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If your dog has had any illnesses or ailments, you can tell us about them at any time without having to complete the rest of the questionnaire. Simply login to your dog's profile by visiting www.dogslife.ac.uk and click on the link underneath your dog's graph.
The first ever IVF puppies!
The link between intelligence and health - can dogs help us find it?
Portosystemic Shunts
Dog feeding
The first ever IVF puppies!
The first puppies to be born after being conceived by in vitro fertilisation (IVF) were delivered by caesarean section in July last year. A female Beagle gave birth to seven puppies after nineteen embryos were transferred to her. Five of the puppies were from two other pairs of Beagles, and two of the puppies were from a different Beagle dam and a Cocker Spaniel sire.
IVF has been a great challenge to perform in dogs as they only ovulate twice a year. Furthermore when the eggs are released from the dam’s ovaries, they are very immature and dark in colour (due to fatty molecules in them) which makes them difficult to work with in the laboratory.
The study (based at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York) found that in order for the eggs to be mature enough to be fertilised, they needed to be left in the dogs’ oviducts for longer than is usually required in other species. They also found that by adding magnesium to the sperm culture, they could imitate the effect of the female reproductive tract when it’s preparing for incoming sperm. A fertilisation rate of over 80% was achieved using these processes. The embryos were frozen until the surrogate dam was at the right stage in her reproductive cycle.
The development of a successful IVF procedure for dogs could help prevent genetic disorders, and save rare and endangered species of dogs (for example the African painted dog). Since dogs share over 350 genetic diseases and traits with humans (more than any other species), there is also the potential to find out about genetic diseases in humans as well as dogs from studies such as these. For more information on this study please click here.
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The link between intelligence and health - can dogs help us find it?
Scientists at the University of Edinburgh and the London School of Economics have discovered that intelligence in humans and dogs can be measured in very similar ways.
Researchers developed an IQ test for dogs which assessed the intelligence of working Border Collies. Human IQ tests tend to take less than an hour, so the same timeframe was used for the dogs. It was found that if a dog did well in one test, it also usually did better at the other tests, which is also true for humans, and the tests were more accurate if the dog did them quickly. The study found that a dog’s intelligence has a similar structure to a human’s intelligence.
Both humans and dogs have varying problem solving abilities. It has been found that in humans, people who get higher scores on the tests can also be healthier and live longer. As dogs have a similar intelligence structure to humans, studying dogs could help scientists to better understand the link between intelligence and health. Understanding dogs’ cognitive abilities could also give insight into the causes of dementia in humans (as well as potentially testing treatments for it), because dogs can demonstrate many of the same clinical signs of this disease as humans do too.
Sixty-eight Border Collies took part in the study. Their navigation was tested by the time it took for them to reach food that was located behind various barriers. They were assessed on whether or not they could understand a person who was pointing to something, and if they could tell whether the food was good quality or not. It was found that dogs were willing to take part and seemed to enjoy it making them ideal candidates for this type of research.
Researchers aim to create valid and reliable dog IQ tests which can also be administered quickly, thus helping to advance the understanding of links between health, intelligence and life span. To find out more about this study, please click here, and to read the study’s publication, please click here.
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Portosystemic Shunts
Blood carrying the nutrients and toxins absorbed from the gut is normally transported to the liver, where these molecules are processed, before being released again into the general circulation. The blood vessel connecting these two organs is called the portal vein. Portosystemic shunts (PSS) are abnormal connections between the portal vein and the general circulation, which results in blood bypassing the liver. This abnormal connection might be within the liver (“intrahepatic”) or outside the liver (“extrahepatic”). Portosystemic shunts are rare, but they have been reported in Labrador Retrievers.
The effect of the abnormal connection is that the toxins can accumulate and the nutrients are not processed properly, which in turn can cause clinical signs such as lethargy, stupor, poor growth, seizures and gastrointestinal upset. Secondarily, the lack of blood flowing to the liver can cause the liver to become underdeveloped. Blood and urine tests can be used to identify changes consistent with the poor liver function. The abnormal vessel(s) can only be identified with an ultrasound scan, or using X-rays or a computer tomography scan after a liquid which shows where they are on the images (contrast media) had been injected into the vascular system to highlight the vessel (see the figure below). In most cases the shunt is present early in life which results in the clinical signs becoming apparent when the dog is developing, but occasionally the shunts develop in older dogs because there was a problem with the liver which has obstructed blood flow and caused the abnormal vessels to develop, rather than the other way around.
The treatment of the condition depends on the cause. Medical treatment, such as a change in diet and drugs to alter the amount of toxins produced by the guts, can control the clinical signs in some patients. The abnormal vessel can also be occluded externally, with a piece of cellophane, suture or special ring which can be surgically placed around the vessel, or internally with a small device placed via a different blood vessel in the leg or neck, to obstruct the vessel. The outlook for dogs which can have the vessel completely closed is very good, although the surgical placement of the occluding device is technically challenging and carries risks of complications. Sometimes the vessel cannot be completely closed off as the liver is unable to take a normal volume of blood flow, in which case it is partially occluded.
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Dog feeding
One of the questions we are are trying to answer with the Dogslife project is how often you should feed your dog and with what type of food. Or alternatively, does how often you feed your dog and the type of food you give them affect their health? Of course, many factors govern how much food our pets need, such as their age, size, general health and activities, which is why it is extremely difficult to give general recommendations which cover all dogs. In our research so far, we have not found that the frequency of feeding or the type of food has any effect on dog weight; this doesn’t mean that they don’t have an effect, but simply means that we have not identified them thus far.
As we have previously reported (http://www.dogslife.ac.uk/research) there is quite a lot of variation in both the types of food and the frequency with which they are given. The majority of dogs taking part in Dogslife were fed dried dog food only (80%) or a mixture of dried and wet dog food (13%). The remaining dogs were fed either raw food (1.9%), home prepared food (1.1%), wet dog food only (1.1%) or other foods (3.0%). Furthermore, the majority of dogs did not have variation in their type of diet; for example 66% of dogs were eating a consistent diet of dried food only. This lack of variation is helpful to us, in that it means we should be able to identify other risks for features such as weight gain which are not related to feeding. However the lack of variation does make it harder for us to identify the effects of different food types on features such as weight gain, because for some feeding types we only have very small numbers of dogs.
The frequency of feeding showed a similar pattern, with the majority of dogs being fed twice daily between six and nine months of age. Thanks to all the data you provide us with we can re-evaluate these risks at a later date with more information, which enhances our ability to detect changes which are responsible for small alterations in the risks of your dog developing health problems.
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