Development, validation and reliability of a general and facial sedation scale in horses

Abstract

Sedation in horses is a target of studies that evaluate the sedative effects of drugs in experimental and clinical situations. There are different forms already described to estimate the response of the animals, however without standartization and validation, which makes reproducibility and comparison of scientific results difficult. To fill this gap, we aim to develop a general and facial sedation scale based on previous descriptions and validate them for research applicability. Linked to the thematic project of process number 2017/12825-0, in the present study, 7 healthy horses will be submitted to different sedation protocols with detomidine isolated or associated to methadone and a placebo group, all in continuous infusion for a period of 2 hours and evaluated for a period of 4 hours. Videocameras will be installed to footage analysis by one observer and three other covered. Photographs of the facial expression of the animals will be taken at each moment, followed by the realization of stimulli by a second resercher, whose answers will be evaluated by the main investigator. Inter and intra-observers and test reterst reliability will be performed; the content analysis throught the importance of each item related to the scale as a whole; Internal consistency of the variables; the validity of the construct by multivariate analysis; the validity of the criterion through the Spearman correlation with the gold standard (Analogue Visual Scale); the item-total correlation by the Spearman correlation between each item and the sum of the items of the scale, the reliability intra-observer by the kappa coefficient and the inter-observer by the intra-class correlation coefficient. (AU)