Date of Completion

2021

Thesis Type

College of Arts and Science Honors

Department

Department of Biology

First Advisor

John Barlow

Second Advisor

Melissa Pespeni

Keywords

Molecular epidemiology, One Health, S. aureus, Systematic review, antibiotic susceptibility, domestic animals

Abstract

The main objective of this thesis was to create a systematic review to investigate the prevalence of antimicrobial resistance in S. aureus strains. Preforming a systematic review requires expertise in the subject matter at hand and familiarity of the broad scope of literature surrounding the question. Systematic reviews require a defined protocol that allow for other investigators to repeat the review methods, and some of these protocols are published prior the collection of the data and synthesis of results. In this thesis, a literature review of the current state of systematic reviews in S. aureus in veterinary medicine and a review of systematic review guidelines were conducted. The main outcome of this thesis is the development of the systematic review protocol which will be submitted to Animal Health Reviews for publication. Incorporated is a narrative synthesis of the included references resulting from the systematic review. The references utilized in this review should be considered as preliminary, as only one reviewer was involved in the selection of the final library and the extraction of the data. It was discovered that there are limitations to this systematic review that effect the generalizability of the results and, for this reason, a meta-analysis was not attempted. Based on the narrative review of the selected literature, there were gaps uncovered in the available literature linking the antibiotic resistance to the strain types and a publication bias towards human-relevant animals.

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