IVDD Screening Milestone - 100 dogs
At the end of July, we reached the screening milestone of 100 dogs. It's taken 32 months to reach this point. A huge "thank you" to all the pioneers of this programme who have screened their dogs. We agreed to hold back on publishing results until there were 100 - at the seminar where we discussed this, people felt we should allow a couple of years to get a reasonable picture of results. We have now put the results online, listing the dog's KC name, variety, sex and X-ray score plus grading. Everyone who has had a subsidy from the Breed Council and DHUK Charity consented to have their results published. Our experience with publishing the Lafora results online was a key step in motivating more breeders to take part and we believe there are many benefits from putting the information in the public domain. We will continue to subsidise the screening programme which you can read about here.
70% of the dogs screened have had fewer than 5 calcifications, a level which is considered to be lower risk for IVDD. In the Nordic countries, they recommend that dogs with 5 or more calcifications are not used for breeding. Numerous studies (since the 1960s) have shown that the lower the number of calcifications, the lower the risk of IVDD. In one study, of the dogs which had no calcifications, less than 1 in 10 had IVDD symptoms. In contrast, of the dogs with 5 or more calcifications, two-thirds had symptoms of IVDD. [Lappalainen 2001] Another study showed that dogs with 5 or more calcifications were 18 times more likely to have IVDD symptoms than dogs with no calcifications. [Lappalainen 2014]