Canine Osteoarthritis: Early Signs, Late Care: Closing the OA Gap in Dogs

This podcast episode is sponsored by Zoetis.

Canine osteoarthritis is far more common, and far more underdiagnosed, than most veterinary professionals realize. In a recent episode of the Vet Blast Podcast presented by dvm360, Adam Christman, DVM, MBA, sat down with Mikayla Mayland, DVM, DACVS, to discuss the latest thinking on osteoarthritis in dogs and why early recognition matters more than ever.

Throughout the episode, the duo challenges everything veterinary professionals thought they knew about canine osteoarthritis, from which dogs are actually at risk to what the real first step of OA management is.

Below is a partial transcript, edited lightly for clarity.

Adam Christman, DVM, MBA: When we talked before, we recorded that there are no rules for our senior pets when they're in their gray muzzle years—I love that, all right. So, speaking of our gray muzzles, and you know, even early-age now, what is osteoarthritis? And why do dogs get it?

Mikayla Mayland, DVM, DACVS: Osteoarthritis, [by] its definition, is a degenerative joint disease that can affect all different tissues of the joint itself. Historically, we always thought of it as a wear-and-tear condition that was generally associated with aging, but what we know now is that it really is a disease of the entire joint. It includes the bone, cartilage, ligaments, even the fat and tissues lining the joint, the synovium. So, osteoarthritis can actually, in and of itself, degrade the cartilage, change the bone shape, cause inflammation, and the result of that, generally, clinically [what we’re going to see] is going to be pain, stiffness, and loss of mobility, but realistically, it is a whole joint disease involving every tissue there.

Christman: How common is it?

Mayland: I feel like we're finally starting to recognize it a little bit better, but the overall commonality of it is vastly underestimated. Despite being commonly associated with older animals, there's actually a recent study by Enomoto et al that was looking at the prevalence of osteoarthritis in younger dogs.¹ So they were looking at dogs 8 months to 4 years old, and they found that about 40% of those animals had radiographic signs of osteoarthritis in at least one joint.

That being said, there's another study that shows that radiographic evidence of osteoarthritis correlates poorly with some of the clinical limb function that we can see with osteoarthritis. That highlights that there's a limitation to just looking at the radiographic component, but if you do look at it from a clinical standpoint, in that Enomoto study, they found that about 24% of the dogs had clinical signs of osteoarthritis in that young age window. So now we're looking at a corresponding overlap of radiographic osteoarthritis and joint pain. Those dogs are the truly affected dogs in a very young window. So I know you're probably sitting here thinking, “Well, yeah, right, those are young dogs. Those are not the dogs that get osteoarthritis.” But I challenge you to think about some of the patients in my own clinical practice that are being referred to my orthopedic surgery service. We're talking about a younger subset of dogs, right? The dogs that come to me for elbow dysplasia, the dogs that come for hip dysplasia, or the cruciates that can happen. I've treated cruciates as young as 9 months old, as old as 16 years old, and the majority of them still fall into that younger age category, around 4 to 5 years old, that we're starting to see them for their cruciate ligament disease.

When I look at those numbers and see dogs that are affected in that, you know, 24% of both clinical and radiographic, 40% radiographic, [aged] 8 months to 4 years, I go, “Hey, that's, that's my population of dogs.” I really think we're still underestimating the prevalence of it overall. If we can start to recognize it in these younger dogs, we'll get better at actually getting the numbers that exist and actually know how common it is.

Christman: Yeah, it is common, and it's something that I didn't hear that often, even just a few years ago, let alone what we're seeing now.

Reference

1. Enomoto M, de Castro N, Hash J, et al. Prevalence of radiographic appendicular osteoarthritis and associated clinical signs in young dogs. Sci Rep. 2024;14(1):2827. doi:10.1038/s41598-024-52324-9