Preserving Dog Health Through Testing with Dr. Anita Oberbauer

Dr. Oberbauer is a Professor at UC Davis, where she is trailblazer in the field of canine genetics. Her work focuses on identifying whether canine health conditions are heritable, their modes of inheritance, and ultimately searching for the genetic cause.

She has published a huge body of work, including on canine epilepsy, cataracts in Jack Russell Terriers, deafness in Dalmatians, Addison’s disease, and the effects of neuter status on health in dogs. She helped discover a genetic mutation associated with biting and seizures in the Belgian Malinois, and her lab has several current research projects looking for paw-ticipants: https://cgap.ucdavis.edu/. On top of her many research accomplishments, Dr. Oberbauer is also a breeder of Belgian Tervuren!

If you liked Dr. Oberbauer's talk, you can find all of the Health Symposium videos here!

Transcript

Dr. Anita Oberbauer [0:00] Good morning, everybody! I am really pleased and excited to be here with you today. This is an amazing event, and the inaugural health conference by Good Dog is something that everybody should want to see. So I’d like to take this opportunity to thank the organizers of Good Dog for the privilege of speaking to you on a topic that is really near and dear to my heart, which is health testing in our canine companion buddies. Generally, when we hear the word “test,” we get a little bit anxious because we always want to do really well on tests. But what I’m hoping to do with my presentation this morning is to relieve a bit of that anxiety, to give you an idea of what tests are available and maybe think about how to incorporate them into your breeding program or your own health plan for your dog. What are health tests? 

[1:12] Well, health tests are basically tools and screens. We can incorporate them into the regular health plans of our animals, so that’s why we need to think of them as essential. They can be beneficial to the individual. They can reveal hidden conditions that we don’t know are there. They can give us information on genetic risk that can be potentially passed onto the next generation. And they’re important for the whole breed as a whole, both breeds and dogs in general. 

[1:55] Health tests are valuable tools. We can think of them as tools for every individual animal. Who should actually use them? Well, owners—to provide health information, to develop the appropriate plans for care for their animals. Owners should also do tests so they can give that information back to breeders, so that breeders can have a good idea of what the health is of the puppies that they produced. And then we can also use those tests for intentional breeders, when they are trying to improve the health of the dog of their breeding line, as well as the breed as a whole. What we need to know is that this information that can be revealed is good to know, but we have to always remember that every individual animal is going to have some sort of health condition. No animal—no dog, even though you think that they really are—is absolutely perfect, which means then that we have to weigh and balance and prioritize. I’m going to say this again in the future, but every human carries about a thousand deleterious (or harmful) mutations and a handful of them can be lethal. That is true for our dogs as well. That means that every animal will probably fail a test at some point, when we have enough tests available. They can reveal health. They can reveal risk. When we talk about risk, we have to think that there’s a risk to everything. There’s a risk to eating too many carrots or drinking too much water, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t drink water or eat carrots. It just means that we have to think about what information we have and how to employ that best. 

[4:12] Categories of testing! Well, there’s physical screening. (You’ll hear about those today.) There is also genetic testing, and that is looking for changes in the DNA. One is looking at the phenotype (or what the animal is presenting) and the other is looking at the actual underlying DNA that gives the instruction for making an animal. 

[4:45] An example of a health screen is that we can do radiography. Radiography will look at the individual. We can see, in this case, you might have damage to a joint, in which case you can then coordinate with your veterinarian and with your owner to make health plans. Maybe look at diet. Maybe look at other exercise regimens. It gives you information on the individual animal. 

[5:23] An example of genetic testing is that even in animals that will never be bred, there are genetic changes in the animal that we need to consider when we’re looking at the health of the animal. For instance, there is the multidrug resistance gene (MDR1) that we can abbreviate, and that gene is a defect in how certain drugs are metabolized in the body. Certain dogs that are of herding breeds or have herding heritage (even mixed breeds) may have this mutation. When that dog has that mutation, then it cannot properly metabolize these drugs that we use for (let’s say) parasite control or Ivermectin (for instance) or in sedation or something like that. If those dogs can’t metabolize that drug properly, then that can create a really dangerous (and in some cases fatal) situation for the dog. Having a genetic screen to know whether your dog (pure or mixed breed) has that mutation is really important, before you start doing some medical interventions. That’s why I’m saying that these tests are important, both the genetic and the health screens (phenotype, or the physical) in order to provide the best care for our animals. 

[7:21] What tests should you use? There are lots of different tests that you have to consider for day-to-day health. Your veterinarian will consult with you and perhaps recommend various typical tests, like urinalysis or blood tests or (as I just said) you might want to have some of those more broad genetic tests. You want those to have on board for your dog. Other cases of what tests you should employ: for inherited conditions, the breed clubs will have a health page associated with each breed website. When you look at websites for a breed club, you can generally look under the Health page, and it will list the different diseases or conditions that that breed club and that breed finds typical in the breed. For instance, as you heard, I’m a breeder of Belgian Tervuren. I’m also the Health Education Chair for the Belgian Tervuren National Parent Club. We list the conditions that are most likely to be seen in our breed on our web page. In addition, I’ve given a link on this slide that compiles the main diseases or health conditions that different breeds should look at. That is at an OFA site because it’s just a compilation of the different diseases. Why am I emphasizing this? Even if you have a rescue or a shelter dog, you will have an idea of what kinds of breeds contributed to that dog and therefore those would also be conditions that you would consider for your breed or your mixed breed or your rescue dog. Just an idea of what to think about in terms of health tests. 

[9:38] Why and how are tests developed? What happens is that owners and veterinarians will see a health condition that seems to be popping up. They’ll get an idea that the dogs of this breed have this condition and breeders and owners want to do what’s best, and so they want to minimize the health impact, so they want to find a test to look at their particular dog or that breed if that is a condition that is inherited. When you see, for instance—this is how hip dysplasia was actually started to be tested for: an owner or a fancier of hunting dogs saw that there were conditions where the dogs came up lame and said, “Why is this the case?” Based on that, experts in the field determined that there is a likelihood of disease. What methods and what diagnostics should be developed in order to look for these diseases? And then create a plan for care in the future. 

[10:57] Who are these experts? They’re experts that are radiologists. They are opthamologists. They are endocrinologists. They’re cardiologists. They’re geneticists. They basically work with veterinarians and owners who see an increase in a condition to then say, “What can we do to reduce that incidence?” These experts will set the protocols to make it a consistent test for evaluation. For radiologists, you would want consistency in positioning so that you have reproducibility. A veterinarian in New York will see and diagnose the same thing as a veterinarian in California, in Australia, etc. to make it consistent. And then what we have to do is think about the validity, the reliability, and the trustworthiness of these results. The results of a test have to show that they are looked at consistently and are valid. We would never want a test in one place to say the dog has cancer and another test in another location to say, “No, not really.” You want this expertise that creates this uniformity and validness of a test. 

[12:37] When we test for validity and trustworthiness, we need to think about various components of a test. The test, first and foremost, needs to be accurate. This is a little cartoon to show when we look at a measurement, how close is the measurement in the test to the true value, the true gold standard (so to speak)? The target on the left shows a distribution of marks (bullet holes, so to speak) that are not really hitting the center of the target, which means that that test is not really accurate. When we look at the right, we see a better accuracy, where the test results (or in this case, the aim of the bullets) are closer to the center. That shows that, to the right, we have greater accuracy of the measurement versus those on the left. But it’s not just accuracy that is important in a given test. 

[13:53] We need to make sure that the test is precise. If the measurements are repeated, how close are they to the previous measurement? If the values that you obtain are all over the place, they’re not really reliable. You would never want to have a blood test to measure glucose that one day is super low and the next day is really high when, in fact, the dog is actually normal. You want this precision of reproducibility of values. That is shown in the lower target, where those values are all over the place; they’re not clustered together. And then as you increase precision going up, you see that the values are more closely aligned and more precise. That’s important to make sure that the values you’re testing are the same over time and with different machines and with different individuals doing that. The sweet spot for the tests are high precision and high accuracy. 

[15:15] That’s what you see right here, where you have the tight precise measurements in the actual middle of the target. For those of you who are graphically inclined, if you look over on the right, you see a graph where you have a distribution (a normal distribution, shall we say) of the precision of the test versus the accuracy or the gold standard. Again, the sweet spot is it needs to be both accurate and precise and to be reproducible. Some values or some tests are regulated by international and national standards to evaluate them on a regular basis, to make sure they’re not wandering over time. In canine genetics, there really isn’t a great oversight of some of these tests, so just be aware of that. Different companies have their own internal standards they follow, which is really important. We would like to have a more global international set of standards. That’s been a challenge but is being worked on regularly. 

[16:39] So what are the other testing considerations? Well, we have to consider the cost effectiveness. Sometimes with accuracy, you can get incredibly accurate test results, but it’s very, very exorbitantly expensive. So people wouldn’t apply those tests because it doesn’t have good return on investment. Tests need to be easily accessible, reproducible, accurate within the confines of cost effectiveness. Test results: when we get those test results, they can be binary, which means yes or no. They can be relational, where you have a range, and if you’re outside of that range, then you’re beyond normal and you, I’m sure, are familiar with that with blood values, glucose, or phosphorus, or something like that. There’s a normal range, and then there is outside of normal. That range reflects normal animal variation, as well as the variability in the testing mechanism. When I say normal animal variation, you and I—we all are different, which is great, but it sometimes makes it a little bit challenging to really focus in and say, “Everybody should be the same.” What we’ve seen with Covid temperature testing: the average is supposed to be 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. If you look at people’s variation in temperature, it’s quite variable. This is just that normal variation. We can also think about testing consideration results that are risk. Risk reflects susceptibility. It’s not a sure thing, but an individual has risk. As I said, we know that there’s risk associated with eating carrots or there’s risk associated with drinking water. We’re never going to stop drinking water, but we know that there’s a risk if you drink too much, so that’s what risk tests need to think about or take into consideration. And then clinicians really are important in interpreting those data points and those results because sometimes the data comes back where no is good. No, you don’t have disease. Or no is bad, where no, you’re not healthy. Having that information, understanding that information, is really great. (In case you wondered, I am in a room that is a Smart Room. If it doesn’t see movement, the lights go down, so sometimes I’m waving my hands in order to make sure the lights stay on. It’s a Smart Room, but not that smart.) Those are testing considerations. 

[19:51] Now that we know how tests can be, what are those tests? I mentioned this earlier. We can have health tests that are screenings based on the phenotype. And then we can have tests that are genetic, that are looking at the DNA and the changes and the genes that give the instructions for making certain components of the body. Let’s talk about the health screens because you’re going to be hearing about those today. 

[20:26] The first category: physical examination of an individual. This is really important for the individual of the dog that you’re having tested and what that relies upon is that you have a presence of the condition (a phenotype) that allows you to see in that physical evaluation that the disease or the condition is present. When you do a physical examination, you may disclose the presence of an infectious agent (Covid testing, not in dogs but in humans, it’s very relevant today). It may disclose inherited conditions, so hip dysplasia or Osteochondritis Dissecans or tracheal malformations. It may disclose a developmental aberration. What do I mean by developmental aberration? Well, that would be for an individual. What we tend to do is one of two things, if you’re a breeder: If a condition shows up, you first jump to, “Well, it must be inherited, so we have to get rid of it.” If you are another breed, you might jump to the conclusion of, “Can’t be inherited. It must be developmental or it must have been that the dam was exposed to some toxicity when she was pregnant and so the puppies have developed this condition by a developmental problem.” We need to step back and say, “This is a condition of the individual.” It may be inherited or it may not be, but we need to take into account how to care for that individual with this condition, with this physical testing. As I said, these health screens or health tests are detected by some sort of diagnostic test.

[22:34] The types of health screening: physical manipulation. Where you have a test or a patella luxation, and you actually move it. It can be a physical assessment or a visual appraisal such as ocular evaluations where you’re looking for cataracts or persistent pupillary membrane or progressive retinal atrophy, any changes to the eye. It could be the brain–auditory stimulation test, the big test for hearing in dogs. It could be a radiographic test where you’re looking for changes to the actual structure of the animal.

[23:42] It could be a blood parameter and a body fluid test. We can look for hormones, thyroiditis, changes in the thyroid, changes in adrenal gland function, where you’re looking at hormones before and after stimulation, and that can give you an idea of whether the animal has this condition or you might need to provide replacement hormones. It might be genetic. Loss of thyroid function can be genetic, and that’s where you would look at antibody presence. It can be due to something else. Knowing what the animal has in terms of these physical screens is really important. It could be looking at proteins in the blood for clotting disorders. It could be looking at metabolites or bile acid, something like that. It could be looking for infectious agents. All of these things are important to look for in the individual animal to give a treatment plan for that animal. It can also give information if it’s genetic for the next generation. If this animal has this condition that you know is inherited, you would not necessarily want to include it in your breeding plan. It also, for these tests, requires proper sample preparation, so you can get that accuracy, so you can get that precision. If you handle the sample incorrectly or prepare it incorrectly, you’re going to get erroneous results. Then you would, unfortunately, maybe make the wrong decision. We also recommend (or I do) to do a follow up test, if the test comes back where there’s a disease situation. You would want to make sure the diagnosis is truly accurate and valid. 

[25:44] I was talking about radiographic screening. When you do radiography (and you’re going to hear about that later on today), we need to make sure that the position is proper and that you get that reliability of diagnosis for hip dysplasia, for Osteochondritis Dissecans, for elbow dysplasia, for anything that you can evaluate easily with radiographs. Then once you have that information, you can develop proper nutrition, proper exercise, proper pain relief or analgesic drugs, proper surgery if it is debilitating, and you will help inform that next generation. You can help inform the breeders, so that they know what their animals are producing. 

[26:42] There’s also biopsies. These are, again, health screens. A biopsy goes in with a needle or a surgical biopsy to collect some tissue samples and evaluate whether there is, say, cancer present. You would want to make sure that the biopsy is in the correct location, that you get a good representative sample so you can evaluate whether there is disease present or not, and then make informed decisions on proper treatment of that individual animal. 

[27:21] How can these phenotypic or health screens be used? They can diagnose the individual animal, which I’ve been emphasizing all along, to give proper health treatment plans for the individual. And they can be used in a breeding program to reduce the incidence. For instance, if you had dogs that had thyroid disorders that you knew were genetically inherited because you got the appropriate test to say, “This is a genetic form of thyroid disease,” then you would not breed individuals who have thyroid disease. You would also think about the broader pedigree, the individuals, the relatives, the grandparents, the uncles, the aunts, the siblings. You would consider them in your breeding decisions. This illustration over on the right just shows over time the use of hip screens. This was a Swedish study where over on the far left, you have a greater proportion of red, which represents hip dysplasia—green is not hip dysplasia—in particular breeds that are prone to hip dysplasia. Breeders conscientiously chose breeding pairs that didn’t have dysplasia and then, over time, you see the proportion of dogs in these breeds with dysplasia decrease. So using that information, they were able (in this population of breeds in Europe) to reduce the incidence of this debilitating disorder by selectively breeding individuals that didn’t have dysplasia. Clear ways of improving the breed health, the population health, and the health of dogs with concerted selection and breeding. 

[29:35] The second category of testing, which is getting more and more prominent now, is genetic testing. Genetic testing can provide owners the knowledge of whether a condition exists. As I mentioned with the MDR1 gene, you’re not going to see by the dog itself. It looks perfectly healthy. But if it has that mutation in that gene, it will not be able to metabolize certain drugs properly, so you would want to know that before you treat that animal so it can provide knowledge that a condition exists. It can provide owners knowledge that there is a potential condition that will probably show up at a later age. Progressive retinal atrophy—there are genetic tests for this eye disorder in particular breeds. Should a puppy show the genetic profile of being at risk or going to develop progressive retinal atrophy, you would want to create a plan for that animal over time so that you help and know that, with time, the animal’s eyesight will deteriorate. How will you be able to help that dog navigate with loss of vision? That gives you a plan for short and long term—very helpful with potential conditions. It gives insight into the contributing breeds for a mixed breed or shelter dog, so you can get breed signatures that might show you what breeds actually make up this breed that you see in front of you and you say, “Hm, what’s in this breed?” Well, if there are breeds that have genetic conditions, you would want to necessarily know that so that you can have a long-term plan for that individual dog. Importantly, these genetic testings can give owners and breeders information for the genetics that can be passed on to that net generation and reduce the incidence of those diseases into the future. There’s probably, when we talk about genetic testing, lots of different genetic tests that are currently in place and that are coming on board—probably more than 170 genetic tests. Some of those are for traits we want, and some of them are for traits we don’t want. When I say the potential condition, we need to talk about risk and susceptibility. I mentioned before that some genetic tests speak to the risk of an animal developing the disease, but not surely. (I’ll get back to that in a moment.) 

[32:54] When we talk about genetic testing, we have to give an idea of: what does genetic testing do? Genetic testing targets the DNA. The DNA are the genes, the instructions, underlying an animal’s behavior, skin color, coat color, fur, shape, and texture, ear shape, metabolism; all of those things are governed by the genes. Genetic tests rely upon specific laboratories such as the sponsor of this Good Dog program, Embark and Paw Print, Paw Print being the sponsor I think you said. Those are companies that do genetic testing. As I mentioned, these genetic tests detect alterations in the underlying genes that govern production of traits of interest or phenotype. That genetic test can also illustrate or provide information on genetic signatures—not necessarily a trait per se but a profile that represents an individual animal. I mentioned that everybody is different. I’m different. You’re different. Those genetic signatures reflect that difference. You can see it in parentage testing, as well as in genetic diversity. I, with my postdoc, wrote a paper that is available online, and everybody was given a link to it. I think Michael sent that out early on. That white paper gives background on genetics, genetic testing, and consideration. It’s a very extensive document that outlines it. 

[35:03] With genetic testing, we need to obtain DNA from an animal to get that DNA to analyze. Most of the time, we will either collect DNA from buccal swabs, which are little micrositology swabs that look like little mascara brushes rubbed on the inside of a dog’s mouth, collecting cells that sort of slough just by natural processes. We can collect saliva. You can collect blood. From those samples, you extract the cells and then from those cells, you collect and harvest the DNA. And that DNA then is used for the test to look for specific changes in those genes that we’re interested in. The important thing about collecting your DNA is not to contaminate it, so you don’t have other DNA samples within the sample that you’re sending off so you don’t get dog sample, cat food sample, cat, etc. 

[36:16] The DNA, as I mentioned, encodes proteins and elements necessary for life. What we’re looking at in these tests are changes in the DNA sequence that encodes or drives the information for those genes in an animal. That altered function in the DNA, those changes in the sequence, are what causes the changes in the proteins or in the metabolites, which means a change in how the animal functions. 

[37:00] So what genetic tests exist? Well, I’ve been emphasizing disease testing, so breed-specific tests: PRA (progressive retinal atrophy), hyperuricosuria (which is stones in urine), we can have phosphofructokinase deficiency, cystinuria, factor VII deficiency (which is similar or related to Von Willebrand's and related to clotting). There’s more than 170 different tests, and they will give you health information that is inherited. You can also get information on traits of fur, shape, texture, and color, so that is very important when we are looking at our animals. 

[37:56] As I mentioned, these genetic tests are run by specialized laboratories. They’re commercially available, and you (as an individual) can get those tests, can order them and buy them online, send them off, and you’ll get the information back. This is a little bit of a challenge because sometimes the information you get back may need interpretation, so that’s where you want to consult with your veterinarian, or there might be genetic consulting opportunities within that company, because not all of the information is inherently obvious. Sometimes it’s a risk. Sometimes it’s a test result that is for a breed that’s not your breed, so it’s not relevant. Why I say it could be breed-specific or broadly applicable tests is you might get a breed-specific test, you might get a test or tests that are bundled for a particular breed, or you might get a test that is a broad-spectrum panel test that tests for all the variants that apply to any particular breed. That’s where it’s important to make sure that you’re interpreting the test results that are applicable to your breed. An example I like to give is that the tax code is huge. It’s ginormous. But not all of the pieces of the tax code apply to every individual person. That’s where you need a tax preparer to give you advice, to say, “That part is not relevant to you. This part is relevant to you.” Then you can look at all of the advertising for these different companies that offer the test, and magazines and testing reviews will say, “This test is better,” or why they like this test, and you look at different reviews for the different tests that are available by different companies.

[40:08] The DNA testing of DNA signatures is really quite interesting to a lot of people. We get these signatures that show this individual animal is different from that, and that’s where it’s used in forensics. Court cases will use DNA signatures of dogs to see whether a dog was present (a given dog, an individual dog, it’s like a fingerprint) at a crime scene or not. In addition, it can be used for parentage or breed identification. Parentage: So this dog on the right is a dog that we sent out to two different testing companies to say, “What breed makes up this dog?” 

[41:06] One company came back with a breed ancestry that was 50% Mexican street dog. Another company didn’t have a category, so it wasn’t listed as that. Another company came back with Boxer, German Shepherd, White German Shepherd, Chow Chow, mixtures of herding breeds, or a super mixture. Each company will give a different characteristic or definition of the breed’s contributing. They’re giving those differences based on their database of different breeds, so they will compare to their database and say, “This dog’s signature looks like these breeds,” so that’s why you get differences in characterization of a given dog of mixed heritage from different companies. It’s because they are comparing to their database.

[42:10] How can genetic tests be used? They can be used in lifelong development. As I said, they can give you a plan for future health. If a dog is going to lose its eyesight, you can plan now. If you want to avoid certain drugs, you will have that ability to plan now. But you can also inform mate selection with the goal of producing healthy, temperamentally-sound, long-lived dogs that have desirable traits. You can incorporate them with the goal of improving the population as a whole. 

[42:59] The ideal genetic test is an exact causal mutation. It’s accurate, precise, and it’s completely predictive, where you have two normal dogs and they will only produce normal dogs for that condition. Or if you have a carrier dog, you can breed to a normal dog, and you will know the proportion of dogs that carry that mutation and dogs that don’t. And then you can breed with surety, and you know that affected dogs will produce affected dogs. This is a great way of taking a trait (or a deleterious, harmful mutation) and breeding it out of the population, when you have a nice, clear exact mutation test. 

[43:47] However, we still need thoughtful interpretation because breeders want to do what’s absolutely right and what typically happens is: “I have a carrier, I need to take it out of the population completely.” But when you do that, you actually reduce the variability within the population. What I’m showing in this diagram is you have a population with a lot of different, colorful dogs. And then if you remove all of the black and the lavender dogs, you’ve removed all of their genetics, and then you replace them with the red, green, and blue. If the red, green, and blue dogs have a disease that you don’t have a test for, suddenly you have an overabundance of that disease in your population, and you have nowhere to go with it because your population is more homogeneous. All I mean by this illustration is to say tests need to be applied very prudently and thoughtfully, so that you don’t change the population completely. You want to gradually remove deleterious or harmful mutations from a population. 

[45:00] What do we need to think about? Tests, as I said—are they valid? How and who designed the test? Importantly, is it relevant for my dog and my breed? When you’re getting these panel test results, there’s going to be a lot of data and not all of it is relevant to you and your dog. Then think about: If we use that test, how will it affect the population? This is really important in breeders, who sometimes want to do the right thing to such a degree that they eliminate. For instance, if the breed has a large prevalence of a particular harmful mutation, eliminating all dogs with that harmful mutation means you’re left with just a handful of dogs to take that breed forward. That can be really problematic. So you need to think about it as a whole.

[46:00] What are the implications for that test? The test—there are nuances. Some, as I keep emphasizing, are breed-specific. In some cases, the same disease is caused by different mutations in different breeds. Some breeds we might not have the test for, so if you get a test result back saying your dog doesn’t have this disease, but that test is for a different breed and its same disease, that’s not relevant. So you might get this situation where you think your dog is healthy when, in fact, you just don’t know what that test is for. It hasn’t come to be evaluated yet. So even if you have the perfect test, you need to implement it prudently. 

[46:58] Risk—this is a big one. Because not all tests are definitive. They may just be saying: What’s the risk? What susceptibility? It accounts for some proportion of disease but is not fully accounting for it. So risk can be seen in one breed but not all breeds. Risk is important because it’s not guaranteed. That’s where applying a genetic test (knowledge for that test) is great, but it’s not going to be absolutely ready for prime time for implementation. 

[47:44] An example of a condition that is risk: this is dermatomyositis. This is seen in Collies and Shelties. Three genes contribute to the expression of the disease, so you have a low-risk genotype for these 3 genes, a moderate risk, and a high risk. 

[48:24] Why I am showing you this is because you can have breeding where you breed a high-risk dog to a low-risk dog and still get low-risk. You can breed two low-risk dogs and get low, moderate, and high risk. You really cannot apply a genetic “don’t breed any with this risk” because you’re eliminating so many valuable dogs from your population. It’s just risk. It’s not certainty. It will vary across the individuals and in their puppies. This is an example of a really complicated situation that we’re going to find ourselves in when we get more information on more inherited diseases. 

[49:09] What’s an owner to do? Don’t eliminate dogs from your breeding pool based upon a test that’s not relevant to your breed! You need to prioritize your health information and not breed on a single trait, because if you breed on a single trait, you’re going to lose a lot of the very good things that your breed has. And then if relevant to you, you provide proper treatment. Don’t get a false sense of health because your dog didn’t have these mutations that aren’t relevant to your breed. People get all excited: “My dog is clear of 170 diseases!” Well, your dog doesn’t even have to be considering or worried about those particular diseases. And then certain dogs, you don’t want to say that you have a risk for a disease so you’re going to really start doing hyper surveillance or you’re going to euthanize a dog because it has a risk for developing this lethal condition. You need to be very cautious and aware, and that’s where you want to consult with your veterinarian. It shouldn’t be that a genetic testing situation is really a roller coaster of unknowns. 

[50:39] You want information, go to your breed health clubs to see what information and what diseases are typical for your breed. And then you can test for those or put emphasis on those in a very prudent way. 

[51:00] Implementing tests—consult with your vet. Read the health information. Prioritize the traits you want. That’s health. That’s temperament. That’s the way they look, the way they behave, and then you’ll get an A+ on your breeding and your health testing. 

[51:24] With that, I thank everybody for your attention and for Good Dog for making such a great conference. I hope you have a great rest of the conference, and I’m happy to entertain any questions now.

Dr. Mikel Delgado [51:41] Thank you so much, Dr. Oberbauer. We do have some questions. That was a great talk—very helpful. We’re getting a lot of questions about specifics about genetic tests. Since I know that you’re deeply involved at the Veterinary Genetics Lab at UC–Davis, hopefully you can touch on some of these. Why can you get certain tests from one company and not in another? Can you explain the behind-the-scenes of what’s going on that causes that difference?

AO [52:07] Certainly. There’s a lot of different thoughts about it. One is cost effectiveness. Some companies may view that as not being a good way to invest their time, to develop those tests. In other cases, the companies defer to the laboratories that design the test. So some researchers have designed particular tests, and they offer the test or they’ve patented it but don’t get into patent law. They may have a better way of interpreting those tests or nuances of the tests, so they feel comfortable offering the test, whereas another company might not feel comfortable. Some companies will bundle 4 different breeds, so they’re emphasizing the more prevalent or more prominent tests. For others, certain tests may require particular preparations and they don’t feel comfortable having those preparations. Does that help?

MD [53:20] That’s great! It ties into the next question, which is that one of the viewers said: My breed has a fairly new test that was developed by and only available from PennGen. Do these tests have patents on them and how long before it would be available from other testing companies? Is there an issue with patents? 

AO [53:40] I’m not a patent lawyer. In the human medical situation, they have defined and determined in the courts of law that DNA is not patentable. So the mutation cannot be patented, but the procedure for evaluating it can be—the methods. In some cases, there are groups that don’t want to walk that line, and they just say, “We don’t want to even have that risk of being sued.” Other companies say, “Okay, not a problem.” In general, it’s a tricky situation. It just depends on the company’s desire to maybe explore or not explore some of these tests. If the methodology is patented, that is pretty (in my understanding) firm. Patents, I believe, run for 7 years in the US. 

MD [54:53] Okay, at some point it does expire?

AO [54:57] That’s my understanding. But you’ve got lawyers with Good Dog! 

MD [55:03] That’s true. Great! This is, again, a lot of testing questions: How does someone find a specific test for a specific breed? I know you mentioned breed health pages. Is that the best place to start? 

AO [55:18] There’s two places that I know that have been trying to compile that genetic information. There’s an online website—gosh, I hope I get the name right. Well Dog. That is a consortia that is trying to be international to compile all of the information on genetic tests. The link to that website is in the white paper that I published, but they’re trying to compile all of the genetic tests and give you information as to whether it’s relevant to all breeds, to some breeds, to specific breeds only—trying to give some context. That’s where we’re challenged right now. Some people call it the Wild West in genetic testing, because lots of information is coming about. Some of it’s not validated. For instance, I’ve done some research where we have genetic information that shows risk and the risk is for a very narrow group of dogs and should not necessarily be broadly applied. Does that help? 

MD [56:35] That’s great. Liz had kind of an unusual situation. She had an 11-week-old Rottweiler puppy who, sadly, passed away while he was playing. She did save cheek swabs for DNA, and I think the question is: Should she submit these? Is there anything helpful she could learn? The necropsy was normal. Should she do something with these swabs she collected? 

AO [57:01] That’s a good question. There are a few places… the one that I’m most familiar with is the CHIC database. That’s affiliated with the OFA. In full disclosure, I’m on the board of OFA (Orthopedic Foundation for Animals). That will bank DNA. You can bank it and send it in with a description of the information of that dog. It will go into a library that, should that information be helpful for future studies, it could be available. That’s a challenge right now. Banking DNA is great. It’s useful. It’s not useful unless we have health information and follow-up information. It requires a huge repository and concerted library cataloging, etc. But for Rottweilers, there is a bank for that. She could submit through CHIC. Long answer, but hopefully that helps.

MD [58:15] That’s a great thing to know, for people who unfortunately find themselves in that situation. To be able to contribute your dog’s DNA to the future of research and science is also a great thing. We’ve got another question: My breed (Toy Manchesters) has very specific genetic tests that can only be done through one university lab. They’ve completed all the recommended genetic tests through that lab. Is there any reason they should do one of the broader genetic panels?

AO [58:45] That is an excellent question. The broader genetic panels have been banking the results of those tests and that may provide ability for future studies. It might not, if there is no health information associated with the dog with that submission. You might get additional information that might be confusing to you, or you could get information that you can just say, “Well, that’s curious. We’ll put it aside.” The 23 and Me is sort of that kind of “I’m curious; can I get that information?” The health test values that your breed club recommends are the ones that we know about in your breed. It may be that we find certain conditions in the future, and that information from a broader spectrum might give information. It might not. Flip a coin. It’s not a great answer, so I apologize. But a lot of people like that, but it might not be necessary. 

MD [1:00:10] I will just say one thing you said that resonated with me is just that there’s no perfect animal. We can only control so much. 

AO [1:00:21] Thank you! Thank you! That’s a point I try to emphasize. There’s no perfect animal. Even if you do have a perfectly healthy animal, you have to breed it. If you’re going to breed it, you’re going to choose the best mate. 

MD [1:00:37] On that end, I think this is a perfect time to wrap up. Thank you so much for taking the time on your Saturday. It was a fantastic talk, really an honor to have you kick off our day. Again, thank you so much, Dr. Oberbauer, for being here. We pin the link to your white paper in the comments, so if you all in the audience want to check out that paper, it’s there. You can always get in touch with Good Dog folks later.