CA in OES
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| I'm very sorry about the diagnosis. Have you visited the OESCA Health website? I started going through the links the other day and there's a lot of information there on the condition along with videos. (Maybe you'll be able to get in touch with the families.) http://www.oeshealth.org/ca_info_center.php Kristine (Mad Dog) can likely share much more because of her involvement with the OESCA's health and research... she's on the committee. Probably already done but please get in touch with the breeder so others can be tracked/monitored. I'm sure others will share more information. Wishing you and Abby the very best.  |
What is Ca?  I will google it but sorry to say I don't now what it is in Sheepies... |
| It is Cerebellar Abiotrophy. Here's the link to the OESCA Health pages with info: http://www.oeshealth.org/ca_info_center.php (oops - see that Jaci already posted the link) |
| Hi, Jaci. Yes, you guessed right - I PM'd the poster earlier with some basic info and the OESCA link. Crazy weekend. Will probably take me 24 hours to catch up om life and forum both in general. Kristine |
| I have been to that website, and spoken with Dr. Bell who referred us to our state specialty vet. Looking to talk with someone with an affected OES to see what to expect and maybe get some tips to help Abby better. Thank you!!! |
| I suspect you're not getting a ton of responses because for all the attention CA has received it is still a relatively rare affliction in the breed. I.e. not too many people have lived with it, though I suppose it may have gone undiagnosed in some cases if it was late onset with a slow progression and so on. I encountered CA in 1999. My now co-breeder got a call that a bitch she had co-bred and who was in a Canadian show home was diagnosed with CA. The bitch was about Abby's age when she was diagnosed, which was a little rare as it's typically later onset in our breed, but it happens and from a breeder's point of view, better to know earlier rather than later. The breeder had kept a dog (male) from the same litter, and two good friends who do performance similarly had a boy and a girl from the same litter, plus there was one in a pet home. At that time, though I feared for my friends' dogs, it was all pretty incomprehensible to me and so I started reading up and asking question. In the mean time, the boy the breeder kept was a gorgeous moving dog who went on to win the Open dog class at the national that year (I'm not revealing any secrets here - he's listed in OESCA's Open Health Registry as an affected dog and his breeder has always been very open about him and his sister) at the age of two. It was maybe four months later when his breeder and I got back from dinner with friends and took him and his younger cousin out to potty on a frigid, moonlit Wisconsin night that I first noticed a slight stumble which seemed to have no real cause (stumbling over "nothing"). If I didn't know about CA I never would have given it another thought. He was a large dog, OES can be a bit clumsy, but with his CA risk (with a known affected sibling he had a 25% chance of being affected himself) and the fact that he normally never put a foot wrong, I wondered. But saw nothing else of concern for several months. Nine months later it was clear that there was something wrong and given his pedigree risk a pretty clear culprit in the matter. The progression was not dramatic - just a slight stutter, if you will, in the front, the "high stepping" and the head trembles came later, but if you knew what to look for and knew the dog, it seemed glaring. He was tentatively diagnosed by a neurologist who had been working with OESCA on CA and was very familiar with the symptoms. A definitive diagnosis can only be made by necropsy, though because these dogs tend to have very high quality of life for quite some time and it seemed unneccessarily cruel to expect owners to put down a beloved pet for research purposes (a number of breeders did, and it's because of them we know as much as we do to date, but that is a story for a different day) neurologists devised a way to diagnose it quite effectively upon viewing the dog's gait (CA affected dogs move in a very distinct manner, there is no pain involved in the condition itself, and there is a definite progression, though it may vary in minor ways) The understanding being that after the dog was gone a necropsy would need to be performed to confirm the disease definitely. Anyway, the question here was really about living with such a dog. There are no medications that can halt or slow the progression. There are no pain meds needed specifically to manage the condition itself, though as they progress and become more clumsy they may begin to take tumbles so you have to watch out for that (I've discussed this with another breeder friend who lived with a CA dog for many years, I think he lived to be maybe 10 or so, Tommy was 9 1/2 and her experiences were like mine that neither of these two dogs had the, pardon me, good sense to slow down. Absolutely no sense of self preservation) They don't know anything is wrong - even though there is in essence a disruption in the messages being sent from a specific part of the brain (that is deteriorating - the rate of deterioration is what controls the rate of progression in symptoms) that controls motor function, in their mind they seem not to know the difference. Messages sent/received can be delayed or disrupted if you will. and the result is that they don't quite know where they're placing their feet always (proprioception is affected) and nor, more disconcertingly, do they seem to care. Both of them, ironically, were real life's a party boys, and nothing was going to slow them down. Going up and down stairs is often where you start seeing the effects first and as time progressed we put a leash on him for major stairs to try to control the speed of his ascent/descent. Not that he particularly appreciated it, because in his mind he was perfectly fine, thank you very much. As he progressed he wasn't left where he could have free access to stairs (other than a few steps) The other thing you notice with time is involuntary head trembles. (Think similar to Parkinson symptoms, perhaps?) The more excited the dog is, the more noticable the head trembling. Keep in mind that most OES get excited by pretty much everything including the sun rising in the east and you can imagine what that's like. With Tommy I especially noticed it at feeding time. I think, looking back, he would have benefited from a raised bowl in a HEAVY stand that he couldn't fling around. The other things I realized after the fact - when he was about 8 he seemed to be in some pain and so his breeder had him x-rayed and he had some arthritis of the neck which he was put on NSAIDs for - is that the tumbling can take it's physical toll on their bodies (not surprising, really), and so, too, perhaps, can the involuntary trembling. As I said privately to Abby's owner, had I known then what I know now I would have suggested he get regular chiropractic adjustments to reduce some of the compensatory effects on his body. And, of course, he would have been on joint supplements from an early age. You also have to watch them carefully to look for signs of pain and consider a higher than average risk of premature arthritic changes, not directly from the CA but as a side effect from the impaired movement, and be willing to consider pain meds as needed for those. Other than that I can't think of anything off the top of my head. I was devastated when he was diagnosed but he taught me a lot about living day to day and never letting anything get you down. If you fall, you bounce right up and keep on trucking and you don't worry about who you take out in the process.  Despite the disease he was in his mind a perfectly normal OES, and lord knows one of the happiest ones I've ever met. The baggage was all mine. He's been gone almost 4 1/2 years now and I still miss him. One of the owners of one of his unaffected littermates was diagnosed with Parkinsons not too long before the orginal CA diagnosis. She's gone now, too, her Maggie outlived her by several years. But as it turns out the NIH has decided our OES CA research shows promise that it may benefit research into certain similar human diseases, such as Parkinson's, perhaps, and have in turn supported our research efforts, which has been a tremendous help to our researchers. This scenario is becoming more and more common - canine health research in many areas including cancer is catching the attention of those who research the causes and treatments of many human conditions, and in reverse. I find it somehow fitting that man (and woman's ) best friend turns out to also be our greatest ally in this arena as well. And though it was too late for Jean, I like to think that Tommy's DNA and so on will someday help researchers unravel Parkinsons and the likes. OESCA has an entire section dedicated to CA on their website. If anyone is interested in further reading go to http://www.oeshealth.org/ then Open Health Registry, then the CA Information Center. Though there isn't much there that really tells you about living with an affected dog, day to day. The disease is, thankfully, not as common as some in the breed and so there aren't as many who have lived with it up close and personal. Kristine |
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