Vet School 101 Hip dysplasia in dogs (part 2): The real cost of diagnosis

Now that we’ve discussed some of the politics of hip dysplasia in dogs (in last week’s post on the same subject) it’s time to count the nuts and bolts involved in its diagnosis.

Every dog is potentially at risk of suffering hip dysplasia—no matter his or her breed. This post is intended to help those of you who take on new dogs (whether it’s a purebred pup or older mix) learn more of the ins and outs of how vets come to this diagnosis so you can be more proactive in your dog’s long term orthopedic health.

As mentioned in the previous discussion, the treatment for hip dysplasia in dogs tends to depend on the age at which the condition presents itself and the severity of disease once it’s diagnosed. As with any disease, the sooner it’s diagnosed the more options that can be made available for its treatment.

So how does an owner come to realize that their dog has hip dysplasia? Unless a pet limps, has an abnormal gait or shows some other sign of discomfort, most owners don’t worry unduly about hip disease.

Enlightened owners and breeders who understand their breed’s predisposition to hip disease, however, are likely to understand that poor hip conformation can lurk beneath the surface for many years before outward signs become obvious. And with a proactive veterinarian as partner, even the most inexperienced owner is given the choice to have their pet diagnosed early.

For me it starts at the first puppy visit…and continues at each successive physical examination.

Pups can be unusually willing to have their joints manipulated. This opportunity means that even the tiniest babies can often receive a tentative diagnosis for at-risk hips. Pups with “crepitance” (a grinding sensation) in one or both hips on manipulation can be flagged as requiring follow-up attention in the form of X-rays as early as four to six months of age.

With basic X-ray techniques pioneered by the Orthopedic Foundation for Animals (OFA), a certifying organization for canine hips, even pups at this young age can be identified as having dysplastic hips—which means they can potentially receive treatment (surgical or otherwise) at this time.

A basic set of X-rays of this type will run anywhere from $150 to $500 in most general practice settings. The cost depends on whether sedation is deemed necessary (usually it is if you want the best set of X-rays available) and whether a consultation with a radiologist or surgeon is in order—if there’s any doubt, consultation with a specialist is always the right approach.

This is how we position dogs for OFA hip X-rays:

Though OFA will not “certify” an animal for good hip conformation until two years of age (when hips in most breeds no longer change their basic joint structure), X-rays of this type will often prove sufficiently diagnostic for younger pets who are moderately to severely affected.

Here's what "excellent" OFA hips look like in a beagle:

Here's an example of mild hip dysplasia in a similar dog (see how the ball of the hip joint isn't as well-set into the socket?:

Here are poor hips (see how the ball part of the hip joints are barely in the sockets?):

Certification (which is strongly recommended for breeding animals) can, however, be achieved earlier through an alternate method:

PennHIP is another diagnostic approach that requires deep sedation or anesthesia (due to the specific position they must be placed in for the X-rays). Pioneered by one of my profs at the University of Pennsylvania, it’s considered a more sensitive test than the OFA method. That's because it's considered a more objective measurement of hip conformation. As such, it can be applied as early as four months of age to predict even geriatric changes to the hips.

This is how we position dogs for PennHIP X-rays:

And here's what the PennHIP X-rays look like:

Unfortunately, the PennHIP method is not frequently applied, mostly because vets need to take a course before they can certify animals with it. Though most specialists consider it a superior predictor of disease than the OFA version, adoption of the PennHIP method is hampered by its perceived complexity (we take measurements of the hips from the X-rays) and the need for veterinary certification.

The cost for PennHIP X-rays consequently runs a bit higher ($300-$600, on average).

Of course, not all dogs are subjected to X-rays at this young age. The expense (and risk of sedation, even if minor) often precludes these diagnostic procedures. Much though I’d like to screen ALL my canine patients by six months, I realize that the cost of this approach can seem prohibitive given the relatively low risk of requiring early intervention-type care for hip disease.

That’s why the vast majority of my patients are X-rayed as older dogs, once signs of probable hip disease become evident.

If an inexpensive genetic (blood) test were available, it would certainly improve our ability to treat these dogs and, furthermore, to prevent even mildly affected animals from breeding and passing on the trait.

But for now, asking your vet about hip disease and concerning yourself with the long-term orthopedic health of your dog (especially if he’s a large or giant breed) is possible through these early tests.

If you have a large breed dog, especially if she’s a high risk breed (shepherd, Lab, golden, Rottweiler, etc.), think seriously about spending the extra cash early on. In fact, why not ask your vet to snap off some X-rays when he/she’s under anesthesia for castration/spay? After all, it only costs an extra hundred (or two, at the most) if the pet is already anesthetized for another procedure.

If every dog owner were so cautious and considerate of their pet’s orthopedic future by investing their hip wellness through early diagnosis, we’d surely prevent a tremendous amount of suffering in the form of early treatment. After all, the real cost of diagnosis is minimal if it means preventing much larger expenses later in life.

Stay tuned for more on this in next week’s post.

October 27th, 2008

Add Comment32 Comments

I'm a veterinarian, and we routinely recommend hip xrays when the dog is spayed/neutered which, at our hospital, is usually at 6 months of age. I like to remind owners that hip dysplasia isn't just a "large breed" disease. In fact, pugs are ranked as the 2nd most likely breed to have hip dysplasia (behind English Bulldogs)! Small breeds are definitely affected. Early diagnosis is critical for a long, happy life.

JC October 27th, 2008 01:26:00 PM

I'm very curious what forms of "early treatment" you recommend. Will you be covering that topic in next week's post?

Mary Straus October 27th, 2008 01:51:00 PM

Great blog! And the pictures are wonderful to illustrate. I'm still comparing the OFA to the Penn hip position, am I correct that the Penn hip is not pulling down on the legs? Maybe you could extrapolate a bit.

JC, you are right about breed size. It is the parent/national club focus on what the major/minor concerns of the breed is. Therefore without mention on the Sealyham health concerns, it was known about IVDD (although under-reported IMO), but no mention of hip. To my best recent recollection, my Sealy is slightly less affected than the "mild x-ray" , but my curiousity makes me wonder: 1. how long it was present or discernible via x-ray 2. could this also contribute in some way to IVDD 3. would surgery be a reasonable alternative or treatment for a mild case 4. are there any forms of mild legg-perthes (yes, I know it is different disease) 4. could the IVDD some how contribute to poor hip health? 4. are there other reasons for arthritis in the hip joint unrelated to HD?

Ok, these are probably questions from "dummies" and the larger breed owners have a better grip on this issue.

Barbara A. Albright/New Hampshire October 27th, 2008 01:53:00 PM

Mary: Yes. Delaying this exciting information on treatment is part of my devilish plan to keep you waiting with bated breath ;-)

Dr. Patty Khuly October 27th, 2008 01:53:00 PM

JC: I shouldn't have stressed the large breed issue in the latter half of this post. Your comment (in which you're right to point out bulldogs and pugs, among other small breed sufferers) makes it obvious that some vets (like me) don't push as hard as we should on hip issues when it comes to the smaller breeds. It's probably true that much of how we approach hip disease is the result of our "signalment conditioning" in vet school and beyond.

Dr. Patty Khuly October 27th, 2008 02:12:00 PM

Dr. Khuly thank you for the informative subject matter. As breeders, we have been slow to accept the PennHip vs. OFA for a few reasons. One is the limited number of vets available who are trained in the procedure, also the cost can be a limiting factor as well as the fact that the general public is not familiar with PennHip. I personally am put off by the fact that the dog has to be completely anesthetized for the PennHipp procedure (for good reason they manipulate the hips to great extremes, no dog would stand for it ). And after the amount of feedback you got a few days ago concerning anesthesia complications, just imagine a death during one of these procedures! Yikes, I wouldn't want to be the vet telling a breeder that her bitch or stud died during a diagnostic test for hip soundness. But I digress. The people making inquiries to us are very smart and ask appropriate questions pertaining to CERF and OFA status. Very rarely do they ask about PennHip.
I would like to mention that the first year is so very important when it comes to the developing hips. We warn our new owners not to allow their pups to overexert themselves in the first year by taking long hikes and runs or climb many stairs and most of all no jumping on those back legs! Even if hips look good at 6 months they can do so much damage if they are not careful with a growing pup.
Also for the information of other readers the PennHip website has pictures of the THREE views that are taken www.Pennhip.org. And if you would like to look up any dog who has been OFA certified you may do so at the OFA website www.OFFA.org.

Chris October 27th, 2008 02:30:00 PM

So, when I bring my new dog Goodman (2 year old large mix breed) in to meet the vet and schedule a neuter, you think it will be a good idea to ask about hip X-ray?

Xslf October 27th, 2008 06:20:00 PM

In response to the other breeder Chris above:

I find your comments troubling. It seems to me that you are justifying propping up the inferior (if not useless) OFA standard simply because the "general public" is more familiar with it.

I would contend that (1) The overwhelming majority of the puppy buying public doesn't know about OFA or PennHIP, nor do they care. (2) It is up to breeders to be informed on the issues and to encourage/enforce a code of ethics among breeders and to advertise why these issues should be important to puppy buyers. (3) Breeders aren't immune to economics and will do anything that they can make a profit from.

Anyone, especially puppy buyers, who is informed on health testing, like OFA, could be given a crash course in PennHIP in one sentice: Unlike OFA which is a subjective assessment of the hip joint and has shown to give inconsistent results from the same x-rays depending on the analysts reviewing them, PennHIP is an objective measurement that is unlikely to be misinterpreted and which gives the breeder a measurement of actual hip luxation, a comparison of your dog to every dog in their breed that has been tested, and a breed specific chart showing what percentage of dogs with any given score have gone on to a diagnosis of hip dysplasia.

Near universal testing of breeding stock is going to cost a lot of money, and this will require breeders to pass on the expense by raising prices. If you don't want to get undercut by cheapo mill breeders, then you need to ADVERTISE why your product is a PREMIUM product and why you are offering a service that is worth paying extra for.

The truth is, show breeders have a fixation on the cheap DNA tests for mostly benign and/or rare disorders. This comes from public awareness that inbreeding leads to frankendogs and doing DNA tests provides evidence against that and allows purebred breeders to keep prices higher. HD is far more prevalent than almost all the diseases that cheap DNA tests can find, and it's also going to be a lot harder to breed away from. That is, IMO, the reason that breeders haven't adopted it with more enthusiasm.

Unlike a DNA test where you can say "100% guaranteed not going to get disease X" (even though without the test that satement would read 98% chance your dog won't get the disease anyway)... the best case scenario with hip testing is "the parents rank here and here within the breed, and M and N% of dogs with the same score go on to have HD.

There is no guarantee with HD, and there likely never will be one.

Also, the high prevalence means that most breeders would have to just give up on their breed altogether if they really wanted to not breed dogs with HD.

HD in dogs is like heart disease in humans... in most cases it doesn't become crippling until long after dogs pass their breeding years, even wide spread education about it won't make people stop breeding, the behavior factors that exacerbate the problem are not likely to go away.

Really, you try keeping a puppy from jumping and playing and running for 2 years... even if you're successful you're likely to have horrible behavior problems.

HD is not a problem that will be solved by breeders. It will only be solved with gene therapy.

Christopher Landauer October 27th, 2008 06:56:00 PM

Christopher, I am not interfering with your argument of OFA vs. PennHip, I do not know enough about either to make informed comment.

I do however, agree that most "buyers" aren't informed nor care about any testing. However, I disagree with it being used as a "selling tool" or costs passed on.

And then I got completely lost on your cheap DNA testing and what context you mean? It is not cheap by any means, most taking decades of research dollars, and then still, once perfected, an individual test is still 100-150 dollars.

If you should be unfortunate to purchase a puppy that has one of those diseases, some incurable and devasting, you would be grateful for that cheap genetic test. You just lost me on that concept/statement.

Barbara A. Albright/New Hampshire October 27th, 2008 07:18:00 PM

As JC states, we too recommend rads at the time of spay/neuter. We have a pretty high compliance with this as it saves the owner money/another anesthesia and of course, can help them in the long run. We deal with pet stores that have a 1yr guarantee so waiting till signs show can result in lost money for the client too.
Thanks for the nice coverage of this topic.

Christine October 27th, 2008 07:38:00 PM

I'm not against cheap DNA testing at all! But let me make some points to clarify.

- $150 is cheap. It's about the cheapest thing you can put on your puppies' for sale ad / resume. Performance titles cost lots of time and money. Show titles cost lots of time and money. Buying a dog from a popular or successful pedigree costs lots of money and time on waiting lists. A DNA test bullet point "CEA free" is really a cheap selling point, especially because a single DNA test result is likely to mistaken for "this is a healthy puppy."

- $150 DNA testing is cheap in light of all sorts of testing for hips. Many tests can be done at home with a swab. No paying an office visit fee, no paying an x-ray fee, no paying for kenneling time while your dog is woozy, no paying for gas and time lost to and from the vet, etc.

PennHIP cost me $500 for a single dog. I'm thrilled to support the test and to have the information, and I love talking about the test with puppy buyers especially when they don't ask. If they don't get a puppy from me they should know what they need to ask someone else.

But you have to realize that DNA tests are not the-all-end-all of "health." The vast majority of DNA tests, especially the popular ones, are for VERY VERY rare conditions. Many of them benign or variable in expression. For example, in collies, there are many tests for eye conditions. Most of these, even when expressed, are minor. But test results for these conditions are the new Scarlet Letter.

Also, I've personally watched as well to do breeders, bolstered by a hand full of DNA tests, have done stupid things like inbreeding their lines.... and poetically, they produced puppies with a crippling condition (TNS) simply because they thought that a few DNA tests meant that they could partake of inbreeding safely. No surprise that once almost the entire litter died, there was a call for a new cheap test for TNS! and that TNS must certainly be more commonplace than previously thought and it's not the new hot button disease.

IMO, far more harm has been done in the name of stamping out diseases with limiting breeding pools than has been gained in benefits.

Christopher Landauer October 27th, 2008 07:45:00 PM

Christopher, It is not my intention to poopoo * any* test at all, nor attempting to claim that any single test guarantees a healthy pup. That would be foolish. I do support genetic research or conclusive tests, however, and while the "end product" may be cheap in comparison to PennHip, you are not mentioning the years it takes of continued club member dollars and cooperation to get that end result. Not too mention that most breed clubs are involved in funding several research projects simultaneously. If the Scottish Terrier Club of America ever becomes successful (lofty goal, I admit) to finding a genetic cause to Transitional Cell Carcinoma, it will end the #2 affliction/cause of death in a breed 18 times more likely than any other breed to develop it.

And yes-siree, showing for titles at either end of the name, does indeed, add up to $$$.

Barbara A. Albright/New Hampshire October 27th, 2008 08:10:00 PM

Another thing to remind people is that checking hips is not just for show dogs or purebred dogs. Mixed breed dogs, even altered, should be checked if they are performance dogs. This holds for both competitive performance (e.g., agility) and noncompetitive performance (e.g., keeping up with an active family). My aussie is a Humane Society refugee, and she has OFA excellent hips, certified a few months shy of her 3rd birthday. She has done hiking and some heavy-duty playing in the snow in addition to her obedience, freestyle, and agility career.

kabbage October 27th, 2008 08:21:00 PM

Christopher-Please note that we have more than one reason for using the OFA testing not simply because it is familiar to the public. Your observation that PennHip is more objective may be true to a point. The OFA observation is a determination from a radiograph of a bodily structure. The subjective part is that they give a rating from that observation "Excellent," "Good," "Fair," or "Poor." This is somewhat subjective, but it is a long way from a breedable Excellent to a Fair from what I have been shown.

As far as the puppy buying public knowing or caring about testing practices, I don't know who you sell to but the folks who come to me are very savvy and inquisitive. We enjoy dealing with people who want to learn as much as they can before deciding on a pup. We try to share our knowledge and recommend resources where they can learn more.

I believe that the goals of all responsible breeders should be to improve their particular breed. We should use whatever testing is available to us that we feel is reasonable, accessible and accurate.

Chris October 27th, 2008 08:59:00 PM

To my knowledge the strongest feature of PennHip is its predictive ability. Gail Smith, the veterinarian who developed it, also has a BS & PhD in mechanical engineering on top of his VMD degree. So his PennHip methodology is rooted in sound biomechanical principles that allows for the calculation from the radiographs of a "Distraction Index". The DI as he calls it can be used to predict the likelihood of any given pet getting hip dysplasia. Gail has charts of DIs for different breeds and although, like gambling, he can't tell you with absolute certainty whether any given pet will or will not get HD, PennHip can paint things in objective terms that are hard to argue with. Same can not be said of OFA.

Alex October 27th, 2008 09:34:00 PM

If PennHIP was serious about hip improvement in gene pools, they'd run a voluntary open online database (as does OFA). And they'd make aggregate raw data available so that breed communities could track and analyze more than than the median.

If PennHIP had ANY familiarity with population genetics, they wouldn't pronounce that half the population of any and all breeds should be culled based on a single metric for generation after generation.

Bah. That said, I use both PennHIP and OFA, and require my pup buyers to either OFA their dogs and check the open registry box on the application, or PennHIP and provide a copy of the results to the registrar for our breed registry dB. That's for breeding and non-breeding animals. More information is better. It's not always cut and dried what to do with it, but it beats being in the dark.

H Houlahan October 27th, 2008 10:24:00 PM

Dr K, I've read some articles expressing dissatisfaction with PennHip's diagnostic success- showing that it's just plain not as accurate until after the two year mark. (I can pull the citations out of my email if you want 'em, but it's all peer-reviewed studies.) I've also heard reports that dogs show discomfort post x-ray from the positioning.

Hips are not considered a problem in my breed; I will be x-raying everyone anyway. But I plan to use OFA. Without a significant number of dogs being x-rayed, I also think the PennHip number would be less useful than a less relative measurement.

Cait October 28th, 2008 04:00:00 AM

Cait - Your logic is poor.

OFA can't be done before 2 years, period. So why would PennHIP's supposed inaccuracy prior to 2 years be a reason to choose OFA? By the time you can OFA, you can PennHIP without the supposed problem you've stated. Early PennHIP is a godsend as it's the only early means of getting any information on dogs that are going to be trained in dog sport. It's certainly not a downside.

I've never heard about PennHIP causing discomfort, but I imagine if you stretch your dogs' legs as most agility people do, you're unlikely to experience discomfort. There's nothing radical about the position the dog is placed in. Possible discomfort is a poor reason to avoid a superior test.

And you are grossly misinterpreting the test. Your results are not relative to other dogs in your breed. That's OFA. An "excellent" poodle is not the same as an "excellent" shepherd, and in many cases a "good" shepherd can be retested "fair" or "excellent" with the same x-rays.

PennHIP is objective, it gives you an actual measurement of how far out of the joint the ball is. Your dog could be the only one tested in your entire breed and it would give you the same result as if your dog is the 100,000th tested.

PennHIP is NOT relative.

What PennHIP ALSO does is gives you a break down of where your score ranks in your breed. That is not your score, that is just more information. Your score is not 60% percentile. Your score is the objective Distraction Index. You can call or write at any time and ask for an updated percentile if more dogs in your breed are tested.

That's the other major benefit. Constant improvement in information.

You've stated that you don't think many dogs are PennHIP'd in your breed, SO WHY DON'T YOU IMPROVE THAT! Light a candle instead of curse the darkness??

Again, your test will be no less helpful if you're the first one (likely you're not even close) and your participation improves the database. All you really need to do is call PennHIP and ask if they have enough dogs in your breed for your comparison to be "statistically significant." Highly likely that they do.

If your breed is small or has only a few tested dogs, you'd actually be doing a service to the entire breed to go PennHIP, going OFA does nothing.

And before you test, tell me this, would you do anything different if your results came back Excellent vs. Good vs. Fair ? Can you even tell me how much worse Fair is than Good and Good than Excellent? If the results aren't going to change your behavior, why test at all?

Does Fair mean you shouldn't do agility? Or not breed? Or only breed to Excellent dogs?

OFA answers none of those questions and NEVER WILL.

As PennHIP has greater adoption and multiple generations, we will have statistics to illuminate those questions. Questions like "If I breed a dog with tight hips to a dog with loose hips, what kind of hips will the puppies have and how likely will they be to get HD." Except you can replace tight and loose with actual specific scores.

Arguing for OFA is like arguing for analog in a digital world. Why pay for 4 levels of information that aren't that helpful when you can have much greater specificity that actually tells you something about your dog and about HD.

Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor say nothing about HD. They're kind of like asking a student how they feel about the math problem.

Christopher Landauer October 28th, 2008 01:38:00 PM

I'd also like to address the discomfort of the PennHIP vs OFA X-ray position: Only dogs who are already uncomfortable with hip disease will experience discomfort with these procedures. Furthermore, I would assume that pulling out the limbs á la OFA would be more uncomfortable for pets with arthritis in the joints--but I've ever heard that either method caused significant pain for any length of time.

Dr. Patty Khuly October 28th, 2008 03:59:00 PM

Chris - actually, I'd be the first to have a dog in EITHER of the databases of my breed, since it's an extremely rare (and relatively new) breed to the US. No breed club in ANY country considers hips a problem, and people just plain aren't checking.

Your information is directly contradictory to a great deal of information that I've gotten from both organizations. Given that I would like to use pediatric screening as a selection tool and our small gene pool, I want to make sure that the pups I select to keep intact and grow up as potential future breeding stock have the best possible chance of screening to have excellent hips as adults. So a high margin of error in pups checked young is a major issue to me, as is the fact that PennHip requires sedation whereas OFA doesn't.

Your attitude is also extremely offputting. For example, I would guess that the SV has provided us with the largest database of hips for a specific breed. Their system is even vaguer than OFA's! Or the British system, which uses numbers in a way I haven't quite understood yet. And the lack of searchable and provable results is also huge. At the price they charge, why on EARTH are these results not searchable? (Also, what's with the attitude problem?)

Dr K - I'm not sure, to be honest, since I've only had a dog prelimed for OFA, and he's not arthritic- I had him x-rayed because he was in a weird growth phase and I wanted to make sure it WASN'T hips.) He had no discomfort at all afterwards. (Prelim'd Good- I'll have him re-done for his final certs osmetime this winter.) I've just heard this from multiple people, including some local agility folks whose dogs are screening fine but they're stiff and sore for a few days afterwards. (Interestingly enough- and I only JUST realized this, but all the people who have mentioned it have breeds on the small side- papillons, some whippets, and some Eskies- so maybe that's a factor, too.) There's only one local PennHip vet, as mentioned above- so maybe that's a factor? I was very put off by her office, which I will admit is another reason that I've decided to stick with OFA at a vet practice I'm more comfortable with, who is the local sports med and reproductive stuff vet, and just seems like a better fit for us in general.

I want to do what is right by my dogs and breed the very healthiest dogs I can. I'm planning on requiring all pet people to have hips & elbows x-rayed and the x-rays submitted (with public results) to OFA when the pups are 2. I do my eye checks and patellas checks (the only two that any established breeders do) and I'm hoping to be the first person to title this breed in performance events. But there is just SO much information. With a rare breed, it's not so much about DNA tests (although I'd disagree with the other poster about htem being for 'rare' conditions- information about CEA carriers is invaluable in collies, where simply throwing out all potential carriers will shrink our gene pool to nothing and the new PRA test came out today, which is another wonderful tool. Neither of these diseases are at ALL rare. There's currently a study going on for the only 'major' eye disease (MRD) in German Spitz at Cambridge, which will hopefully result in at least some useful information about it's heritability.) as just doing the very best you can.

Cait October 29th, 2008 03:01:00 AM

H Houlahan (and others): I agree that an open online database for PennHIP would be helpful. But I also believe that if it were open, fewer veterinarians would report their findings, as they are *required* to do by PennHIP. Let me explain...

With OFA, a general practitioner can easily take a look at a set of rads and often will know instantly whether the animal will receive an inadequate conformation report from OFA. That means that these animals are never reported to the OFA and breeders can choose not to inform their buyers of their breeding dogs' poor hips.

With PennHIP, certified vets are *obligated* by contract to report their findings to the database so they can get the ideal statistical rating for the breed in question. This method is therefore as objective as it gets.

If the database were open, as I agree would be wonderful in an ideal world, I believe that far fewer vets would report their PennHIP findings and the database would not be as robust as it could be. Vets would simply take a quick look online to see where their patient's hips lie in relation to others of their breed and would have more of an incentive *not* to report the findings--especially if the hips proved poor.

Sure, Gail Smith and other PennHIP stakeholders also win by keeping this database proprietary and by charging for managed access to it, but I don't like the alternative, either. I like that PennHIP's approach requires that ALL dogs are reported to the database.

Furthermore, I believe that OFA's late certification date (at 24 months) gives too many irresponsible breeders a way out after they've invested in showing a great dog and already have designs on their breeding future.

When breeders can screen and certify pets at a younger age (4 months!), they can adjust their expectations for the dog as a show and breeding prospect *before* investing so much in them.

I think everything points to the use of PennHIP as the ideal method.

Dr. Patty Khuly October 29th, 2008 07:57:00 AM

Cait -

Why shouldn't I be snarky? You're basically saying that you're supporting the crap test because of any number of factors that have nothing to do with the efficacy of the test. You don't like some woman's office, you hear your little dog might be discomforted, your breed club friends do the other one, you don't like anesthesia. Boo hoo.

One thing I know for sure is that the OFA Prelim is the biggest joke in the business. It's even more prone to selective reporting than the actual OFA since the owner gets to check the box, you don't even need your vet to collude. To make the matter worse, the OFA caved to pressure from the breed clubs to take the breeders off the hook with the early testing and they now have a blanket policy to not publish any prelim results, no matter if you check the box or not, until the dogs are a full year old.

WHEW! Now we can just say "well, that's OFA policy" instead of "we use this test to decide if we even want to test at 2 years... if we get a poor result, then we just will not test and say that the hips are just fine."

If you want to be a breeder, I think you should be better prepared to make difficult decisions. There's already too much lock step conformity in the dog fancy and I get the impression that you'd prefer to go with the flow and be one of the gals instead of make the tough decisions that the dog fancy has been unable and unwilling to make.

If you treat OFA as "anything but Poor" is a passing grade, then why pay for it at all? You can pretty much tell if your dog is poor by throwing a ball and watching him run after it.

And the hand full of eye exams are not invaluable. If anything they are an example of "if you can't obsess over the tests you want, obsess over the ones you have." In Border Collies, my breed, PRA is not prevalent at all, but since Collies have it in large numbers, there is a test for it. The major problems, like epilepsy, have no test and unknown heritability.

So what do breeders do? Make PRA a hot button issue "What? You haven't tested for PRA!?! How irresponsible!!!!" and ignore epilepsy "What can you do?"

This is like obsessing over acne in humans and ignoring heart disease.

Christopher Landauer October 29th, 2008 03:13:00 PM

re:sealyham terrier

All the smaller dog breeds with short, heavy boned legs are prone to IVDD.
I would say there is no strong relationship between IVDD and HD on the
whole, but there could be a correlation in some breeds, coincidentally or otherwise.

Legg Perthes is very different from HD. It is not a hip conformation problem.
It is a vascular problem. The hips can have good conformation. X-Rays can
differentiate if one or both problems are present.

eli November 1st, 2008 07:14:00 PM

eli: thanks for the comment regarding IVDD. I'm interested not only because of personal experience, but because it is a serious and debilitating disease, just as HD. From what I have read it involves and abnormal metabolism in the disks. My Sealy had both Type 1 (acute) and Type 11 (chronic).

However, IVDD is not prevalent in all short-legged "dwarf" breeds, as it is not known in Scottish Terriers. But Scotties do have legg-perthes every now and then---diagnosed before a year of age .

I can't help but be curious to whether there was earlier indications of arthritis or abnormality in my Sealys one hip, but I will not have access to those x-rays to compare. The x-rays that it was pointed out are at the age of 10+ years of age, and it has not caused a serious issue (yet).

Barbara A. Albright/New Hampshire November 2nd, 2008 10:49:00 AM

my question is would a breeder know if her pup at 18 months would have hip dysplasia?

el November 26th, 2008 09:37:25 PM

I need a vet to write a letter stating that hip dysplasia is heritable, is this correct?

EL November 26th, 2008 09:39:18 PM

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