Heritability of canine hip dysplasia

Abstract

Canine hip dysplasia, a developmental disease, was evaluated in the dog with respect to the reliability of the two-year-of-age radiographic phenotype to predict the individual's breeding value. Critical evaluations were made in only one breed, the German Shepherd Dog, where radiographic phenotypic evaluations were conducted. Two hundred forty-four individual offspring from 54 full-sib families were used in this study. The parental radiographic phenotypes for each full-sib family were also evaluated. The metric trait used in this study was an index developed from the utilization of the linear discrimination function. the index value, which resulted from radiographic measurements, is a measurement of the individual's canine hip dysplasia status with respect to normal breed phenotype. The heritability of this metric character (the index) was estimated utilizing several methods of computation.