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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Study asks what makes golden retrievers sick

What makes golden retrievers sick? Dogs sought for $25 million study to find out

Bear the golden retriever was part of the family, a “little brother” to Michael Court and Gretchen Kaufman’s daughter.

After he died in 2010 the day after Thanksgiving – “his most favorite day of the year,” Court said – they waited more than a year before adopting a new “golden,” Matilda.

The Pullman couple also signed up Matilda for a study that aims to help prevent cancer and other canine diseases. To his owners, Bear’s cancer looked and felt like a bump on his head. It turned out to be an aggressive bone cancer called osteosarcoma that had grown into his brain.

While dog owners and vets know golden retrievers face a relatively high risk of cancer, they don’t know why. The Golden Retriever Lifetime Study aims to tease out genetic, environmental and nutritional causes. Got a golden? With close to 2,000 golden retrievers enrolled – including 68 in Washington and 11 in Idaho – the study needs 1,000 more participants. The dogs’ job is to be dogs, while people observe.

The 10-year, $25 million study of 3,000 dogs is the most in-depth and costliest study of its kind, said Dr. David Haworth, president and CEO of the Denver-based Morris Animal Foundation, which is running the study. Its design is based on the Framingham Heart Study, which has tracked thousands of people for decades to identify common factors behind cardiovascular disease.

Loved by owners for their sociable nature, golden retrievers also make good research subjects, Haworth said.

A popular breed – there’s a big pool of them to pull from – golden retrievers also are “genetically homogenous,” he said: “They’re not quite laboratory rats, but they’re close, in terms of genetics.”

They’re also predisposed to cancer. The Morris foundation says more than half of golden retrievers develop the disease in some form.

A golden who has collapsed prompts fears about hemangiosarcoma, a type of tumor that commonly affects dogs’ spleens, said Dr. Raelynn Farnsworth, one of three vets at Washington State University in Pullman collecting information from canine patients for the study.

Lame goldens prompt worries of osteosarcoma, Bear’s cancer.

“The other thing you always worry about is lymphoma,” Farnsworth said. “Whenever you see an older golden coming in that’s sick, you always worry that’s what’s wrong.”

Through questionnaires completed by owners and veterinarians, the researchers are collecting “boatloads of data” on each animal as it grows up, Haworth said: What do they eat? Where do they sleep? Where do they live? Do they travel much?

The vets mail in the dogs’ blood, urine and fecal samples along with hair and nail clippings collected during “study visits,” which can coincide with the dogs’ regular checkups.

All that data is “not very valuable now,” Haworth said. “But as the dogs get older and some of them develop diseases, we’re going to be able to take those dogs and say, ‘What was different in their life compared to these other dogs that didn’t develop the disease?’ ”

While the study is designed to find the causes of cancer, it’ll also be able to identify risk factors for anything at least as common as cancer, such as skin, ear and liver diseases and arthritis.

Court said he signed up Matilda, now 3, as a way to use science to help dogs. He’s a WSU researcher who studies “individualized medicine” for animals, investigating dogs’ and cats’ adverse response to drugs and how to tailor medicine to help them.

Haworth said the study has the potential to help other breeds – “Golden retrievers seem to be a pretty good model for diseases in dogs, because they’re dogs,” he said – as well as other species, including humans.

As animals who share our environment but have a compressed life span, dogs stand to tell us a lot about the health effects of our surroundings, Haworth said. And molecularly and genetically, cancer in golden retrievers closely resembles cancer in people, particularly lymphoma and osteosarcoma.

Ultimately, though, the point is to help prevent and treat cancer in dogs.

“I like people,” said Haworth, a veterinarian who worked in Spokane from 1999 to 2000 before eventually taking the helm at the Morris foundation. “I married one. I had a couple. But it’s the animals we’re here for.”