Photo by Adam Biro, who is greatly missed.
There have been a lot of updates to the cystinuria project, and samples are needed to validate Penn’s new quantitative test. Here is a summary of what’s new:
First of all, all three of the cystinuria pages on the health website have been updated:
The page that describes our research project.
The page that gives you information on submitting samples for the project — we need both DNA and urine samples, and the SDCA is paying for all testing until Penn’s urine test is validated.
Also, we can now accept samples from Europe and Australia, using filter papers so you can use regular mail — no worrying about keeping samples cold or international overnight shipping! Information can be found on our samples page.
Please note: The SDCA is paying for Penn’s Quantitative Cystinuria Test, which is brand new, for now because we don’t know enough about how it works in Deerhounds in order to interpret the results:
We really don’t know what “normal” vs. “at risk” means.
We don’t know at what point a dog will actually start to form stones.
We don’t know how the disease progresses: do the levels gradually build up, or can the dog be fine one month and form stones the next month?
We don’t know any of these things.
We also don’t know the ins and outs of running the test and if how samples are handled can influence the results. Penn staff is also learning how to best run the test equipment.
This is exactly why we are paying for you to do the test — because we need to test a lot of dogs to learn these things so this test can be truly useful.
So remember:
This test isn’t ready yet to be predictive for stone formation or to be used as a breeding screening test, so please don’t make neutering or breeding decisions solely based on this test result.
If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us.