Hi All!

I have a question about hip dysplasia (HD) in miniature poodles.

Browsing the web, I have seen that only few kennels check miniature poodle for HD (while it is a common practice for standard poodle). Most of them "only" check knees for patellar lux. and eyes for PRA (with or without genetic testing).

Why is that? It is because HD is not common in miniature poodles, as some breeders claim? Or on the contrary it should be something to better check (and breed accordingly) but most breeders simply don't do it? As a rumor, I have heard that most miniture poodles if tested would have some degree of HD.

I'm asking because I'm looking for a poodle, my first one actually. I have been studying a lot about this breed, but this HD issue is not really clear to me yet. My intention is to have a "working" poodle, in the sense that I'm planning to do several activities together (agility, freestyle, perhaps tracking...if the puppy will like it of course!) so the health is really important for me. However, I have the feeling that the number of possible breeders really becomes small if I'm going to select the ones that check for HD as well. May be I haven't searched enough...

Thank you in advance for your attention!
Valeria

Hi, and welcome to the forum!

Disclaimer: I've been into poodles for almost half of my life, at least seven or eight years so I'm not as experienced as some of the people discussing on this forum. I hope that they'll join this topic as well.

I've been searching for a good miniature for a while now and it strongly seems like "a working poodle" as well (for agility, obedience, rescue search and tracking and even for water rescue if possible, thinking of hunting/retrieving). And that is exactly the reason why I'm looking for a dog that has it all: everything on it's place in the head and the great head combined with a healthy body. Besides, it's every dog's benefit not have any kind of sicknesses, even if it's a show dog or "just" a poodle to keep company! Looks and dog shows don't really matter to me.

At least in Finland it isn't a must to check the hips for HD and Legg-Perthes to get the litter to the register and I think that's the reason why most of the breeders don't give a damn. I mean, if you're breeding show dogs and not for "serious work" (if that's the term we can use 'cause it's about poodles) why to check the hips for nothing?

/Tiina

Great to get some international colour on this forum . This english section has been pretty quiet for a while, which is pity, I think, since most of us write english very well excluding typos

I appreciate that you have started to find out about health issues already before the decision of a puppy.

HD is not a really common problem in miniatures, but I still think that hips should be X-rayed routinely. Not only because it is useful to screen HD, but due to a greater hip problem in miniatures: Legg-Calve-Perthes, which is a serious problem in this breed. Legg Perthes is aseptic necrosis of the femoral head (a result of circulation problems in the femoral neck) and occurs between the age of 4-11 months. It can regenerate itself with some physiotherapy, if the puppy is lucky enough to have a mild case, but in many cases the femoral head has to be removed completely since it collapses seriously. When Legg Perthes is developing, the first phase is circulation fail in the femoral head. This is only temporary, and normally, circulation will take up again, but the damage has already been done. While the circulation has been down, the femoral head has started to "die", ie. to get necrotic, and this will cause serious pain for the dog. If the circulation fail has been just minor, the collapse is not as serious and the femoral head may recover without surgical intervention (see the last picture).

In Finland, unfortunately, it has occurred that some breeders have used dogs, which have had this seriuos disease (I mean, even operated ones) for breeding and because the breed-club does not require x-rays from puppies parents it is very easy for commercial breeders to cover this problem. I think that a serious and conscientious breeder will always show parents' hip x-ray results to the new puppy owners so that they know for sure that they are not buying a puppy from parents of which one is actually missing its femoral head completely due to an earlier excision.. If not, you might want to consider buying your puppy some elsewhere.

Interestingly, I talked on the phone with the breeder of my youngest dog which is hip X-rayed and presented on the Scandinavian poodle pages. The hip results, which are still rare nowadays, had caught the attention of this person (from abroad, Italy, if I remember right) and she had contacted the breeder for more information of her dogs. Just because she got delighted after noticing that some kennels really X-ray their miniature poodles and encourage this practice for the new puppy owners as well.

I will add some pictures so you will see what Legg Perthes means in practice.

In the picture below, you can see how the hip looks before the real symptoms in the hip (limbing and pain) occur, when Legg Perthes is developing. First, there is a fail in circulation in the femoral neck. This is obvious on the left hand side and as you see, the femoral neck area is darker in the X-ray, when the circulation does not function properly.


Then here, in the picture on the left, you can see how the femoral head has collapsed (due to fail of circulaton, which occurs first and then necrosis in the femoral head follows resulting in collapse) and in the picture on the right, you can see how the hip looks like when the necrotic and collapsed femoral head has been surgically removed. This is definitely something the vet can not dissmiss in a kennel club, if you send the hip X-rays there for official HD analysis


In this picture there is an excition of the necrotic femoral head going on.


Down below, there is a follow up picture series on a hip that has a mild case of Legg Pethes and the femoral head is recovering without surgical treatment


________________________________________________________________
Then a couple of words of HD which actually already can be found on this forum, but unfortunately only in Finnish. So I will rewrite some of this for you.

Here in Finland as well as in Sweden where I lived earlier on, we have the official categorised hip results from A, B, C, D to E. A and B are completely free from dysplasia, C hips are in general considered to be very mildly dysplatic and D is clearly dysplatic and E a very serious case. However, as I have learned from the vets, the hip dysplasia categorisation is originally developed for larger breeds as german shepherd and does not fit always to smaller breeds perfectly. For instance, the hip bowl in the pelvis can be a bit higher or deeper than it actually should to fit in the categories of A and B. Meaning that the hip bowl is a bit like an ear lobe in people, unigue for everyone. So there is some variation resulting to the fact that some completely healthy hips can fall into category C without being even mildly dysplatic, due to this ear lobe type kind of variation. My youngest dog has this "edge case" on the other hip. The other hip bowl is almost one millimeter higher than it should to fit in the B- category. It falls in the C-category even though the femoral head fits in perfectly and no sigs of dysplasia are present. My dog, therefore, has a hip status of B/C.

Unfortunately, a C-hip can also be a very sick hip. My friend, who also belongs to this forum and owns a brother of my younger dog, told me about a case she knows in miniatures (an acquiantance for her). It is a miniature bitch that obviously, according to the veterinary, had a milder Legg Pethes case when she was under 1 years of age. The hip regenerated somewhat but the dog still has pains and problems in the hip on a daily basis even though she is almost two years old (if I remember right). The hips were x-rayed and the veterinary said that these certainly are D-hips (clearly dysplatic and also otherwise sick hips due to earlier Legg Pethes). But the kennel-club veterinary doomed the hips to be C-category . C-hips, normally, won't cause even minor problems for miniatures. In fact, many C-hips are completely healthy in miniatures, as in my dog and in his mum, who has C on both sides but this is considered to be only due to this "ear lobe" phenomenon that I described above (I would never buy a puppy bred from a bitch that is dysplatic). But this dog in the example is lame and still has "only" C-hips. So it is more important to look at an every single case closely and not to rely on the actual category letters.

x Tiina: you are right, also 'sofa' poodles deserve a perfect health. I strongly believe this is for the good of the breed in general, as for any other breed...

x Johva: thank you very much for your explanation I thought you already discussed this in the forum, but Finnish is really out of my reach!

yes, I care very much about the health of the puppy but the temper it is also very important to me. I'm not interested in the beauty, also because I would not be able to recognize it. as I said before, starting to look for a puppy caring about the health, the temper and in my case the color as well (I would like a silver, although this is not 100% mandatory) really reduces the number of possible breeders. in fact it is more than a year now...

going back to the topic, this Legg-Calve-Perthes is actually in a list of "must-have health clearences" I found in a poodle magazine from the USA. sorry I'm not an expert, so I may do silly questions here: is this problem heriditary or can it occur in every puppy, even if the parents are clear? When is the right age to do the first x-ray to the puppy?

about HD, is it then safe to do sports with dogs having HD up to B/C? also, do you think that a correct growth (in terms of muscle and bone development in the early stage of life) would help in controlling possible levels of HD?

the girl from Italy is actually me and it is true my attention was caught by the results on HD. I asked about this once in an Italian forum visited by poodle breeders as well, but I was answered that there was no need for miniature poodles to check HD or do x-rays in general.

ciao Valeria

vipoodle kirjoitti:

yes, I care very much about the health of the puppy but the temper it is also very important to me. I'm not interested in the beauty, also because I would not be able to recognize it. as I said before, starting to look for a puppy caring about the health, the temper and in my case the color as well (I would like a silver, although this is not 100% mandatory) really reduces the number of possible breeders. in fact it is more than a year now...

I think we have the same priorities excluding colour . Temper is extremely important if you want to do something sensible with your dog, like agility or obedience. A poodle should be lively, sharp, balanced, courageous and very clever dog, ideally. I have two dogs that fit in to my criteria, I am very happy with my youngest male in particular. My third dog, unfortunately, is very soft and has poor, on/off-type nerve structure which makes it difficult for her to concentrate on obedience and agility tasks. Of course it is nice that a dog gets exited about action (it should get exited, ideally), but this dog gets so much over exited that it is barking and yelling like a maniac when something exiting happens and it is very hard, almost impossible to get her attention and get her to calm down when told so.

	vipoodle kirjoitti:
	going back to the topic, this Legg-Calve-Perthes is actually in a list of "must-have health clearences" I found in a poodle magazine from the USA. sorry I'm not an expert, so I may do silly questions here: is this problem heriditary or can it occur in every puppy, even if the parents are clear?

Yes, it is hereditary. According to one article I have read before but can not find now, LP seems to be recessively inherited (meaning that both parents can be completely healthy, but the puppy still gets this affliction) but with a prevalence lower than 100% meaning that even if the dog gets all sick genes that should result to LP, it may stay healthy. There seems to be environmental factors (which are not fully known) that affect as well. In people, LP is also inherited and a bit more common in boys than girls (in dogs sex does not seem to play a role). I have read that there are some environmental factors that have been connected to LP in humans. My attention was caught by the information on one web-site that use of corticosteroids and autoimmune diseases increase the risk of LP in humans if one has inherited the risky genes as well. I have one case of Legg-Perthes (Woolly Bohemia's Oodi Andromeda) in my second miniature litter. Interestingly, she got Juvenile Pyoderma (hereditary autoimmune defect occurring is small puppies) at 9 weeks of age and was treated with a prednisone shot at the onset of this disease. This dog got severe case of LP and has still problems even though 8 years have passed . In those days I did not take X-rays on my bitch (nor the stud was X-rayed) because I was new in the breeders' world and did not know about this disease. Finnish Poodle club and the club magazines did not give any information on this, neither did their web site, and I just concentrated on eye and knee check ups when planning the litter. I am wiser now . Then, this disease was "unknown" (meaning: commonly known among commercial breeders, and no information on this was given for serious small-scale breeders, on purpose) and I, as a new and blue eyed breeder had not warned the puppy owners of this possibility when they bought their puppies from me . The whole thing was a complete surprise for us, both for me and the puppy owner.

When one of the puppies got LP, I started to write about this issue on the old poodle forum (which does not exist any more, this was year -99) of the Finnish Poodle Club on a regular basis and got negative feedback. One of the commercial show breeders (who actually has recently encouraged to breed a bitch who has a clear case of LP , the bitch's co-owner told me this and she said that she has refused strongly ) then told me on this forum that I should get "more healthy thoughts" in my head and follow her example by relaxing with a bottle of wine in the evenings instead of thinking about hips Well, I have drank a plenty of wine after that and it has not helped at all to get poodles' hip problems out of my head

Do you have a possibility to get into university databases of scientific journals? You might want to read this:

Only registered users can see links on this forum! Register or Login on forum!

I think breeders should pay attention to the last sentence stating: "Analysis of the related pedigrees and of the results of the test mating indicated that PD is an inherited condition with high heritability."

I think it is ridiculous and stupid not to require routine X-rays on miniaturepoodles while this type of information on the heredity of LP is available scientifically. LP is very common, much more common than PRA in miniatures. Most cases are not reported to the poodle club since breeders are very sensitive about this issue and don't want that the vastness of this problem will be revealed in public . Swedish Poodle club does not publish diagnosed LP-cases at all, which I think is unbelievable. I know inofficially many cases, here you can see only the tip of an iceberg:

Only registered users can see links on this forum! Register or Login on forum!

Most dog owners won't dare to report about a diseased dog to the club since the dog's breeder will get furious about this, most definitely.

	vipoodle kirjoitti:
	When is the right age to do the first x-ray to the puppy?

You get official result only after your dog is 12 months old. I think official X-rays should be taken right then because this way you can, as a breeder, in the best possible way to show that your dog is not LP affected since it takes time for milder LP to regenerate if the hip is not operated. If any symptoms (stiffness or limbing) wil occur during growth X-rays should be taken immediately.

	vipoodle kirjoitti:
	about HD, is it then safe to do sports with dogs having HD up to B/C?

It is completely safe considering that the C-hip is healthy, not dysplatic or affected by LP. As I told above, some C-hips can be damaged hips (for instance due to earlier LP). It is important to consult the veterinary who thakes these X-rays how the hips are. My dog has one C-hip but it is a completely healthy hip even though it for some unfortune happened to fall into C-category. These categories are very wide and C-category can have edge-cases at both ends. C-hips can be completely normal considering the dog and agility sports as well as breeding, but at the bottom end of C-category, you can have seriously damaged hips. Each case is individual, it is not that useful to just consider a category letter without knowing the case perfectly. Miniatures are fairly light dogs and moderately dysplatic D hips can be ok for agility as well as long as there is no clear artrosis present.

johva kirjoitti:

I think we have the same priorities excluding colour . Temper is extremely important if you want to do something sensible with your dog, like agility or obedience. A poodle should be lively, sharp, balanced, courageous and very clever dog, ideally. I have two dogs that fit in to my criteria, I am very happy with my youngest male in particular. My third dog, unfortunately, is very soft and has poor, on/off-type nerve structure which makes it difficult for her to concentrate on obedience and agility tasks. Of course it is nice that a dog gets exited about action (it should get exited, ideally), but this dog gets so much over exited that it is barking and yelling like a maniac when something exiting happens and it is very hard, almost impossible to get her attention and get her to calm down when told so.

I have a very similar problem, in the sense that the dog I have now (a rescued cross-breed) is extremely good and fast in learning new things but her concentration skills are very poor. So, she is very talented but not suitable for competing or even for long training sessions...where long is about 5 minutes . So, I hope my next dog will be....as a poodle should be! I have heard that there is some sort of link between color and temper in poodles, for example a breeder told me that apricot (and I quote here ) are a bit crazy and not very easy to train....but perhaps this should be discussed in another post.

johva kirjoitti:

When one of the puppies got LP, I started to write about this issue on the old poodle forum (which does not exist any more, this was year -99) of the Finnish Poodle Club on a regular basis and got negative feedback. One of the commercial show breeders (who actually has recently encouraged to breed a bitch who has a clear case of LP , the bitch's co-owner told me this and she said that she has refused strongly ) then told me on this forum that I should get "more healthy thoughts" in my head and follow her example by relaxing with a bottle of wine in the evenings instead of thinking about hips Well, I have drank a plenty of wine after that and it has not helped at all to get poodles' hip problems out of my head

well, I have been told something very similar about my standards for this new puppy. I think that if more people would care about high health standards than we could really have more healthy thoughts and finally relax. Fortunately or unfortunately we are in good company, in the sense that this a common problem to basically every dog breed. Thank you once again for the explanation and the article, I was able to track it down and I will read it.

johva kirjoitti:

I think it is ridiculous and stupid not to require routine X-rays on miniaturepoodles while this type of information on the heredity of LP is available scientifically. LP is very common, much more common than PRA in miniatures. Most cases are not reported to the poodle club since breeders are very sensitive about this issue and don't want that the vastness of this problem will be revealed in public . Swedish Poodle club does not publish diagnosed LP-cases at all, which I think is unbelievable. I know inofficially many cases, here you can see only the tip of an iceberg: Only registered users can see links on this forum! Register or Login on forum! Most dog owners won't dare to report about a diseased dog to the club since the dog's breeder will get furious about this, most definitely.

Yes as you say, not many breeders are willing to share their mistakes. I have now been in contact for a while with a breeder here in Holland but so far she has shown me health checks only on eyes and knees. I will see her next Sunday and ask more about x-rays and LP.