The way HD is inheridet is not so simpel, as a matter of fact the researchers things that 1/3 of the incidences comes from the parent's genes, 1/3 from the enviroment and the last 1/3 is foodrelated for the cat or dog! If this is truly the case no one knows for sure - yet. We have chosen to follow the guidelines as they are laid out by the Swedish Maine Coon Club. You can read more about them here! If you want your cats to be x-rayed and be part of this ongoing project you can download the corret form here!

We have chosen to let Torkel Falk in Sweden take the x-rays of our cats and he then sends them to Lars Audell, also in Sweden, who makes the final accestment of the hips results. Torkels homepage can be found here!

In order to take the x-rays the cat has to be under anastetic. The cat is laid on its back between 2 pieces of plastic and one person is stretching the cats hind legs out as far as possible while another takes the x-rays. The legs has to be strecth out as even as possible, if Lars is to asses as correctly as possible the femurs placement in the hip cup. The closer the femur is located in the hip cup the better a diagnosis and the further away from the hip cup the femur lårbenet is located, the worse the diagnosis is.

Besides the known standard way of taking x-rays of the femurs placement in the hip cup, there is also a method called Pen-hipp, which will asses the cats or dogs HD status. When using this method, several pictures is taken by the dogs or cats hip cup and femur. A lot of people think that this gives a more accurate picture of the dogs/cats hd-status, as suppose to using the "old" standard method on dogs and cats. Unfortunately very few Danish vets are certified to use this method on dogs and none is certified to use it on cats, and this is true for all countries, including the US were the method was developed originally. In dogs it has been noticed that when using the Pin-hipp method, the number of dogs with HD declines, when the method is used for several generations, based on the measurements for Penn-Hipp. Whether or not this is also true for the "old" standard way of taking x-rays for HD is not know as it hasn't been evaluated. One thing is for sure and that is the fact, that by continue to develop methods to take x-rays to minimize the numbers of dogs and cats that develops HD, it can only benefit the breeders who wants to take advantage of one of the tools one can use when chosing the best and most suitable animals to work with in ones breeding program.