Welcome to the Scottish Deerhound Club of America’s web site on Deerhound health issues. We hope this will help Deerhound owners and breeders, as well as those considering adding a Deerhound to their home.
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Photo by Amber Duff.
The 2021 National Specialty is offering a full complement of health testing and sample collection for all of our research.
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Photo by Betty Stephenson
We have worked with the Ostrander Lab at the National Institutes of Health on a few projects now, and they have been very helpful to us—they did whole genome sequencing for our osteosarcoma research, have supplied data from whole genome sequences to all of our researchers, and published some research on the Deerhound hairless mutation (an article about that will be published soon). We would like to help them out with this project. If you can provide a sample (or samples), we would greatly appreciate it!
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Research Sample Collection/Health Testing at the 2021 Specialty
As always, we plan on collecting samples for research and offering discounted health testing at the 2021 National Specialty in Richland, Washington. Here is what we have planned:
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Photo by Shannon Neill
These videos of the 2019 National Specialty Health seminar, presented by veterinary geneticist Dr. Jerold Bell, is based on his analysis of a Scottish Deerhound computerized pedigree database, AKC registration statistics, and pedigree analysis of the most influential Scottish Deerhound dogs and bitches.
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Photo by Louise Laing
John Dillberger, DVM, Ph.D., & Miranda Levin, ONB
Reprinted from the January/February 2021 issue of The Claymore.
Like everything else this year, our research was impacted by COVID. Many projects were delayed, but we did manage to make some progress on a few fronts.
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We have written about percutaneous coil embolization before; here is a first-hand report from the owner of a Deerhound who has undergone this procedure.
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Photo by Verena von Eichborn
The SDCA has supported the Canine Health Foundation’s Bloat Initiative for years. On March 24, a webinar covered much of what they have learned. If you missed it, Health & Genetics Committee member Mary Ann Rose, MD, wrote a summary of it below. If you want to listen to it yourself, the webinars are archived here.
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Photo by Karen Winter
Although we list all available clinical trials on this website through the American Veterinary Medical Association’s Clinical Trials Database, we received a request from Mindy Quigley, Clinical Trials Coordinator, Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine:
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by Miranda Levin, Betty Stephenson, DVM, and John Dillberger, DVM, Ph.D.
The Health & Genetics Committee gets several emails like this a year, so we thought it would be helpful to post this article for owners and their veterinarians, many of whom might not have dealt with cystinuria before.
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Photo by Kikko Kåhre
We are thrilled to announce that the Scottish Deerhound Club of America’s Deerhound Health web site has been updated and moved to a self-hosted site — you can now find Deerhound Health at
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