The Shocking Truth About Pet Supplements: Clinical Trial Diary Part 1
You may have heard about supplements, or even use them for yourself, but did you know that almost all supplements available for our dogs have not been researched or studied?
My name is Anthony Almada and I’m leading the pack to run a first-of-its-kind clinical trial for Front Of The Pack. Over the next nine months, I will be working on a clinical study for Front Of The Pack in partnership with a preeminent veterinary medical school, looking at how supplements work for our dogs.
About Me: Your Clinical Research Collaborator
I’ve lived with fur since I was of single digit age.
Heidi was our first dog; a black with white spots female German Shepherd whose ears never stood up. My parents were insistent upon these listening devices achieving the signature appearance of an AKC (American Kennel Club) breed, placing white tape and tongue depressors in them… yet gravity prevailed.
Heidi went on to give birth to a litter of eight pups, an at home birth (before it was in vogue). No doula. No widwife. No veterinarian — just Heidi and the encouragement and assistance of my parents, and the moral support of my brother and I, albeit from a cautious/squeamish distance. We kept one of her pups and his ears were as upright and attentive as sunflowers aiming toward a midday Summer Sun. His name was Luther.
Heidi, her son Luther, and then our third Shepherd, Max, were all plagued by osteoarthritis of the hips. Each suffered and endured a progressively worsening quality of life. It was heartbreaking to watch. Glucosamine and chondroitin were unknown to all but biochemists and some select scientists in Italy (who were exploring its effects upon joints and cartilage in the early 1980s). This, unwittingly, set the scene for my early interest in supplementary ingredients.
Date stamp: late 1980s.
In my grad school laboratory at UC Berkeley — which afforded a lovely view of the San Francisco Bay and Golden Gate Bridge — I began my research thesis. My research question: does chronic endurance training (on a treadmill) mitigate or aggravate the effects of a diet devoid in vitamin E (a fat soluble vitamin which was discovered at Berkeley some 60+ years earlier) and alter endurance performance? My subjects were young adult females, willing, friendly, dedicated, and…furry. Lab rats.
In 1989, the last year of my graduate research — it was all writing now, no more laboratory work — I entered the world of clinical research at two different academic research centers in San Francisco. Saying goodbye to the rats, I now moved on to human subjects.
A shiny new clinical research associate, I thrived in this setting. Many of the subjects/patients were nice but some complained, others were often late to scheduled visits (when we performed measurements on them, drew blood, etc.,), and they were always equipped with excuses, like: “I forgot I had to be fasting — I was so hungry this morning.” My thought bubble, had it popped, would have released something like, “We review this with you every time, and you’ve been here three times prior. Just admit that you don’t care that much about arriving in a fasted state…”
1993 afforded me — as the co-founder of a sports nutrition brand that put science before sales — the opportunity to co-design a variety of human studies at several different US and European universities. Collaborating with some of the country’s leading research professors, I co-designed the study “protocol”. All of the thousands of published clinical studies I had read, critiqued, and admired were being utilized to design these studies with my own brand’s products. It was a very paternal experience.
Growing Fur
In late 2019 a brilliant immunologist colleague and friend, who was born and educated in London (England), suggested I speak to a company called Front Of The Pack who were inspired to produce the best dog supplements, using the finest ingredients.
The privilege of co-leading my former nutritional product companies allowed me to “bake in” a core principle, a corporate tenet, that has marked the last 25+ years of my career: Prove that our products — the ones consumers, patients, doctors, teams, and parents buy and use — are safe and effective, through independent clinical studies at universities.
What are the best supplements for dogs?
Surveys that I have been making of nutritional products in the market (since the late 1990s) continue to reveal a shocking revelation: supplements in the human field rarely undergo clinical research. And double blind, placebo controlled dog studies are even more of a rarity.
During my initial discussions with Front Of The Pack, we discussed the dismally low percentage of proof for pet supplements. How can any company be claiming to sell the best dog supplements, when not one has a product proven to work?
And so, the Front Of The Pack clinical trial was born.
The Challenges of a Clinical Trial
Surprisingly in a world of continuing advancement, the biggest hurdle we are faced with in sponsoring a clinical trial is creating a placebo that would “blind” a pet parent who is scooping out the powder and seeing and smelling it so that they can’t tell the difference between powders. This is to avoid any unconscious preconceptions a pet parent may think, “Rover, we were assigned to the placebo group — don’t expect anything.” This is called the placebo effect.
The placebo effect has been shown to operate among both pet parents and veterinarian researchers subjectively reporting on a dog’s response to a presumed non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug, deracoxib (Deramaxx® or Vetone Ostimax®). In one placebo-controlled study both pet parents (of dogs with osteoarthritis) and veterinarians examining the dogs (that were assigned to receive placebo) gave subjective reports that revealed a positive/improvement effect: almost 60% of the pet parents and 40–45% of the veterinarians submitted such reports. An objective measure of improvement — a force plate that measures the weight placed upon each limb as the animal trots across it — revealed no changes in the dogs receiving placebo.
[Note: We are integrating a force plate measure into our current university study to see how hard dogs land on each foot as a measure of lameness].
In Part II, I’ll explore how dogs could actually display a placebo response and the importance of combining subjective + objective measures in the design of a rigorous clinical trial in dogs.
By Anthony L. Almada, MSc, FISSN
Mr. Almada is a paid consultant to FOTP; he does not receive any sales commissions/royalties nor own any form of equity in the company.
