Abstract
The authors' stated goal of Breed Predispositions to Disease in Dogs and Cats was to provide a contemporary reference listing diseases by breed using published literature and major veterinary textbooks.Author: This article has been lightly edited for grammar, style, and usage. Please compare it with your original document and make corrections on these pages. Please limit your corrections to substantive changes that affect meaning. If no change is required in response to a question, please write “OK as set” in the margin. Copy editor The intended primary audience is veterinarians, although pet owners and breeders were also considered to be a likely audience. A chapter that reviews basic genetics follows the Introduction. The body of the text is in outline format with breeds listed alphabetically. Most of the book pertains to diseases of purebred dogs, whereas diseases of purebred cats are summarized in 14 pages toward the end. Following the list of diseases by breed, Part III Disease Summaries provides a very brief description of the individual diseases listed under the breeds. There is a limited list of references at the end, but no index. Figures and color plates add little value and often show pictures of bottles of drugs, diagnostic equipment, radiographs of common diseases, or photomicrographs of tumor histopathology.
Although the authors are to be commended for taking on this daunting task, the end result is, unfortunately, of limited value due to lack of organization, citations, or an index. Under each breed, diseases are listed by body system in a seemingly random manner, neither alphabetically nor by prevalence/importance. With the authors' stated goal of providing a reference useful for generating differential diagnoses based on breed, diseases are not limited to those suspected or known to be inheritable, but also include infectious diseases—“diseases” that would be more correctly considered to be clinical signs, such as pericardial effusion, and “occupational risks” such as grass and migration in field dogs. The authors admitted to including rare diseases that may have only been reported in a single publication or a limited number of individuals. Even though they have not been proven to reflect a breed predisposition, these rare diseases were considered to be “relevant breed-related information” (and when based on a single report, this was at least indicated in the text after the disease condition). In contrast, only the top 20 breeds at risk for hip dysplasia by the British Veterinary Association/Kennel Club Hip Dysplasia Scheme were listed as being predisposed to hip dysplasia, which seems to be a serious omission for a text whose goal was to be comprehensive. A few diseases that may be fairly well recognized as having a breed predisposition, but apparently for which a published scientific reference was not found, were omitted. For instance, the Golden Retriever was not listed as being predisposed to ichthyosis. While most diseases listed were readily recognized as having the stated breed predispositions, I was unable to verify, using standard computer-based literature searches, some specific disease syndromes or facts that I found questionable. Throughout the text were numerical values such as relative risk, prevalence, etc., but without citations; it was usually not possible to determine if these data were based on a few individuals, regional populations, or a large breed survey.
In summary, this book would be of limited use to most pathologists as a scholarly reference. Some veterinary practitioners may find it a useful text, but the detail in this reference would be insufficient to make a diagnosis of a disease for which they were not already familiar and would be too technical to share with most clients.