Swedish Vallhund Retinopathy Breakthrough
Thursday, January 8th, 2015As you may have seen elsewhere on the Intarwebs (even on CNN, since the gene involved relates to a form of human blindness), there has been a breakthrough in the research into Swedish Vallhund Retinopathy, and it looks like we will have a genetic test available in the spring! However, it looks like it’s not as simple in terms of inheritance as was thought previously, and there must be other factors involved in whether or not dogs actually develop the issue, since not all dogs who are at risk genetically actually develop the problem, and even dogs who have two normal copies of the relevant gene still seem to have a minor risk of developing the retinopathy (4.7% of the retinopathy-affected dogs in the study had two normal copies of the relevant gene). As has always been the case, many to most stage 1 affected dogs do not get worse, and seem to have no problem with their vision, and comparatively few affected dogs seem to progress to stage 3, and of those dogs, very few go fully blind.