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Cerebrospinal Fluid Creatine Kinase as a Biomarker in Dogs With Neurologic Disease: A Multivariate Analysis to Guide
Taylor A Hanson1, Michael F Rosser1, Benjamin Blair1
1Department of Veterinary Clinical Medicine, University of Illinois College of Veterinary Medicine, Urbana, Illinois, USA.
Background:
Creatine kinase (CK) is typically associated with skeletal muscle injury, but elevated CK in blood or cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) may also be reflective of central nervous system damage. Previous research has therefore explored the role of CK as a biomarker of neurologic disease in veterinary patients. However, the literature regarding this biomarker is somewhat incomplete, as control groups or reference populations have not always been included in previous studies.
Objectives:
This study aimed to further evaluate CSF CK in neurologic dogs-with a healthy control group for comparison-to investigate its predictive value for disease etiology and its relationship to neuroanatomic localization of disease, CSF collection site, other CSF parameters, and patient demographics.
Animals:
The control group included nine healthy Beagles. The neurologic cohort was comprised of 95 dogs with neurologic disease requiring CSF analysis.
Methods:
CSF was collected from appropriate sites with CK and routine parameters measured. A linear-mixed effects model analyzed relationships between variables.
Results:
There was no significant difference in CSF CK between normal and neurologic dogs as a whole. No neurologic etiology differed significantly from other groups or from healthy controls except for dogs with metabolic disease (n = 2). Age and CSF total protein were significant predictors of CSF CK, but no significant relationship was identified between CSF CK and neuroanatomic localization or other parameters.
Conclusions:
We suspect that CSF CK is of limited utility in diagnostic differentiation or localization of neurologic disease in dogs. We suggest that future research explore alternative applications of this biomarker.
