Lymphoma in Irish Wolfhounds
Purebred dogs are susceptible to genetic diseases due to the limited gene pools that exist in each breed. In order to better the health of specific breeds, it is important to study genetic diseases that are common in those breeds. This study specifically pertains to Irish Wolfhounds, a pedigree dog traditionally bred as sighthounds that can grow up to 120 pounds and live only 6-8 years on average. Irish Wolfhounds are among the pedigree dogs at highest risk for developing cancer, succeeded only by Bernese Mountain Dogs. Using the Irish Wolfhound Database (IWDB), a free, publicly available database that contains pedigree information on 165,631 Irish Wolfhounds as of August 2020, data was collected on ancestry, lifespan, sex, and inbreeding coefficients on 266 dogs, who died as a result of lymphoma from 1964 to the present. The goal of my research is twofold: to study clinical signs of lymphoma in Irish Wolfhounds to better equip veterinarians to diagnose and treat it in living dogs and to study the genetic component of lymphoma to help Irish Wolfhound breeders make better breeding decisions to someday eliminate lymphoma from the population. The information presented in this poster contains the groundwork for the research of the genetic component of lymphoma.
Comments
Haha, I DO love dogs and…
Haha, I DO love dogs and hate cancer! Awesome elevator pitch. Could you clarify for me, what is a unimodel versus bimodal distribution (in the section "Prelim results") on your poster? Thanks!
@leenancy@upenn.edu
Unimodal and bimodal distributions is a statistical concept that refers to the number of "peaks" in a data set. If you are looking at your traditional bell curve, you will only see one peak. That means it is unimodal. If you are looking at a different distribution, let's say the heights of 100 randomly chosen Americans, the distribution will be bimodal, meaning it will have two peaks (one for females and one for males, given that the average female height is shorter than the average male height). My point in bringing up the distribution was that if early onset and late onset lymphoma were distinct diagnoses, you would expect there to be two peaks in the data (one representing early onset and one representing late onset), but there is only one peak. That is why I am led to believe that lymphoma simply has a large range of associated life expectancy rather than two distinct courses the disease could take. If you have any other questions, I have my zoom open for the next half hour or so :)
Exciting work!
As a fan of personalized genomic testing for humans, it's exciting to hear that you are working on identifying genetic risk factors that could be meaningful in genetic tests but for our furry friends. What drew you to studying the Irish Wolfhound versus other dogs with high cancer mortality rates such as the Bernese Mountain Dog which you mentioned?
So Cool!
This is the first project I have seen on here about animals, which makes me very excited!! I never knew the risk purebred had to diseases. I wish you luck in your further research!