Bravecto chews: what has been reported.

“Bravecto” is four different products. This page is about one of them: the flavoured chewable tablet you give a dog by mouth, the one that lasts twelve weeks. The topical liquid, the one-month chew and the cat version are separate products with separate FDA approvals and separate records, and mixing them up is the most common mistake in coverage of this drug.

We identify these reports by that FDA application number rather than by the ingredient name, and it matters more than it sounds. FDA’s records spell this one ingredient several different ways, and the most common single spelling covers only 54.3% of this product’s reports. Matching on the application number catches 100% of them. Anyone searching this database by ingredient name is missing about half the record without knowing it.

Stomach upset dominates, as it does for most things a dog swallows. Below that the list thins out quickly. These are counts of how often a term appears across all 58,848 reports, and one report usually names several things.

Showing the 10 most mentioned. Another 1,854 distinct terms account for 63,508 more mentions.

Deaths are not in that table, on purpose.They are reported below under outcomes, where there is a denominator to read them against. The FDA record logs a death in two separate places using two different counts, and putting both on one page gives you two numbers that cannot be reconciled. Euthanasia in particular is a decision a person made, not a reaction the drug produced, so listing it as a “reported harm” would say something the data does not.

On seizures, which is what most people come here looking for: 2,748 reports mention one, making it the fourth most reported harm on this product. That is the signal behind the FDA advisory covering this whole drug family, and it is real.

What that number cannot tell you is how likely it is for your dog, because nothing here records how many dogs took the product. It is a count of reports, not a risk. The FDA, which has seen far more than this public record, still considers the class safe and effective while asking owners to discuss a seizure history with their vet first. We cover what the advisory actually says in full.

Not every report is an injury. “The fleas came back” is a reportable event too, and it lands in the same dataset. Separating the two matters, because a med that failed and a med that harmed are different worries.

On this product the split runs 81% harms to 19% treatment failures, so the bulk of this record really is about things that happened to a dog rather than fleas that survived. That is worth saying plainly, because it is not true across the board: on the heartworm preventives, failure reports dominate.

Showing the 5 most mentioned. Another 52 distinct terms account for 4,321 more mentions.

The FDA asks whoever files a report how the animal was doing. These are their answers, not a follow-up or a verified finding, and a single report can record more than one, so these 58,873 rows come from 58,848 reports.

“Ongoing” is the largest bucket and it is easy to misread. It means the person filing said the problem had not resolved at the moment they filed, often within days of the event. It does not mean the dog never recovered. Nobody went back to check, and the record has no field for what happened next.

The FDA flags whether a report was serious, meaning broadly that it involved something like hospitalisation, a life-threatening event, or death. 60% of these reports carry that flag (35,482 of 58,848), 39% do not, and 247have no value recorded either way. We show that third state separately rather than folding it into “not serious”, because nobody checking is not the same as checking and finding nothing.

On who filed: owners submitted 27,673 of these and vets 8,135. That is worth knowing in both directions. It means the record captures what owners actually saw at home, which a clinic-only dataset would miss. It also means most of these reports were never examined by anyone with a stethoscope.

Call your vet, and do it before you change anything. They can see your dog and know what else it is taking, which is most of the answer.

One thing worth taking into that call: skipping prevention is not a neutral choice. Fleas and ticks carry real disease, so the decision is rarely between a med and nothing.

If you think this product caused a problem, you can add your own report to the record this page is built from, either through the maker or direct to the FDA. Given how many of the reports above came from owners rather than vets, that is a real contribution and not a formality.

Our medical disclaimer applies to everything here.