Friday 29 January 2010
I HAVE had some interesting information regarding canine compulsive disorder (CCD) or what you and I would recognise as obsessive compulsive disorder in humans. Apparently the gene was identified in dogs on Jan 6 through a collaboration between the Behavior Service at the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine, the programme in medical genetics at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and the Broad Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The findings are published in January’s Molecular Psychiatry: “CCD seems to target certain dog breeds, especially Dobermanns and Bull Terriers. For more than a decade, behaviourists Drs Dodman and Moon-Fanelli, at Tufts Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine collected blood samples from carefully characterised Dobermann patients exhibiting flank and/or blanket sucking compulsive behaviours as well as healthy, unaffected Dobermanns.
“In 2001, Edward Ginns PhD MD, head of the programme in medical genetics at UMass Medical School, joined the effort, enabling genetic studies that culminated in the genome wide association study that began in ’07 using the canine affymetrix genotyping array at the Broad Institute. Dogs showing multiple compulsive behaviours had a higher frequency of the ‘risk’ associated DNA sequence than dogs with a less severe phenotype (60 and 43 per cent respectively, compared with 22 per cent in unaffected dogs).
“‘The occurrence of repetitive behaviours and similarities in response to drug treatments in both canine CCD and human OCD suggest that common pathways are involved,’ said Dr Ginns, professor of clinical pathology, neurology, paediatrics, psychiatry and neuroscience at UMass Medical School. Dr Ginns is hopeful that ‘our finding will lead to a better understanding of the biology of compulsive disorder and facilitate development of genetic tests, enabling earlier interventions and even treatment or prevention of compulsive disorders in at-risk canines and humans.’”
This is another interesting breakthrough for the geneticists in identifying the gene for what is a very distressing condition.
JANE PEAKIN, Byzantine.mbt@btinternet.com