Statistics on MVD and SM in the US

[arasara]

Does anybody have any statistics on MVD and SM for the US? Reason being is I shop at a wonderful website, dog.com. I LOVE it.. but on there there's this place where you can choose your breed and I chose CKCS and under health it says this:


HEALTH CONCERNS:

Relatively healthy breed.
Large prominent eyes are subject to injury and infection.
Ear infections caused by lack of air circulating around the heavily fringed hanging ear leather.

(from www.dog.com )

I believe there are FAR greater concerns than eyes and ear infections in this breed and I would like to make an effort to contact these people to maybe make a change to their website as to properly educate people on other health concerns of the breed, however, I would like some statistics to report to them so I can at least have some back up. (:

Thanks guys! :)

[Karlin]

The statistics are consistent across the breed so ths applies to the US as well as anywhere :(:

MVD: all lines, all colours affected; the number one reason life expectancy is a third shorter in the breed than it should be for a toy breed; 50% of cavaliers have heart murmurs by age 5, and almost 100% by age 10. Many will lead fairly normal lives despite this but enough die young to pull overall life expectancy down.

SM: all colours affected, very high incidence of the the Chiari-like malformation (CM) of the skull (nearly 100% of the breed, according to researchers) than can produce SM as a secondary effect. Research samples to date have researchers estimated at least 40% and up to 70% of all cavaliers will eventually develop syrinxes (SM) as well (though most will be asymptomatic or have few symptoms). Not a single research cluster of cavaliers in the US, UK, France or Holland that has been MRI screened -- and these often being samples from breeders that breeders were sure were their clear dogs -- deviates from these percentages.

The good news is that breeders who screen and follow breeding protocols for both these afflictions can make a major difference. This has been known for quite some time for hearts, and now we have the results from the Dutch breeders project of the past couple of years, where the incidence of clear dogs (clear of SM, but usually with CM -- the goal is pain free dogs) has tripled in two years, is particularly exciting, and the fact that when they have mated clear to clear dogs, they have yet to have an affected offspring (eg with syrinx -- and the goal is to lower incidence of early onset SM which is known to be more severe and more painful).