Vetnews | November 2025 22 « BACK TO CONTENTS Article For this subset of cats (n = 1,072), the mean annual incidence of UO was 36.0% (95% CI: 33.19–38.93%) (Fig. 4, Supplementary Table S1). Time series analysis To analyse the projection of cases over the years, the autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA), Holt-Winters, and linear regression methods were applied. For the ARIMA method, the annual case rate as a time series, along with the autocorrelation function (ACF) and partial autocorrelation (PACF) plots, is presented in Supplementary Fig. S2. The model aligns well with the data, as the observations fall within the confidence limits in both autocorrelation and partial autocorrelation analyses. In the projection analysis for the years of 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024, it was predicted a rate of 0.64 of UO in male cats, maintaining the same pattern with no oscillations (Fig. 5). However, based on the fluctuations observed from 2010 to 2020 it is not possible to confirm that the consistency rate will remain stable in the projected years, making this model unsuitable for predicting future case rates. Conversely, the predictive Holt-Winters model showed an increase in the rate of UO in male cats over the projected years (2021 to 2024) (Fig. 6). The predicted rate for 2021 was 0.70 (95% CI: 0.43–0.97). In 2022, the predicted rate increased to 0.83 (95% CI: 0.46–1.20), while for the year 2023, the rate was 0.96 (95% CI: 0.44–1.48). Finally, for 2024, a predicted rate of 1.09 (95% CI: 0.38–1.79) was encountered. These results reflect a rising trend in case rate over the years, with broader confidence intervals for more distant projections. In the linear regression model, the results indicated a mean annual increase of 0.026 (2,6%) in the rate of cases of UO (p = 0.042) (Table 2; Fig. 7). The adjusted coefficient of determination suggested that 38% of the variation in the case rate is explained by the model. Besides the variation in the rate of UO over the years, a linear behaviour could be observed with a tendency of increase of 2.6% per year. Figure 1: Flowchart illustrating the decisionmaking process (inclusion and exclusion criteria) for obtaining the study population (n = 386) Figure 2: Territorial representation of Botucatu (latitude 22° 53’09” south and longitude 48° 26’42” west”) in São Paulo, Brazil, and the mean annual prevalence of the period considered in the study (January 2010 to December 2020). The figure was generated using the rnaturalearth package (https://github.com/ropensci/rnaturalearth) and ggplot (https://ggplot2.tidyverse.org/), on the R platform. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 International License Time series analysis of urethral obstruction in male cats.... <<< 21
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