Spaying and neutering your pets triggers cancer and dysplasia.

Spaying and neutering your pets triggers cancer and dysplasia according to a new study:over the last several years, a number of small, breed-focused and primarily retrospective studies have been conducted on the effects of spay/neuter in large and giant breed dogs, including the Rottweiler and Golden Retriever. The following information to illustrate what the research has uncovered about the potential benefits and adverse effects of gonadectomy: spaying or neutering large and giant breed dogs decreases or prevents most reproductive organ disease, as you would expect, since conventional desexing surgery removes some or all of those organs and the hormones they produce. The diseases for which spayed or neutered dogs are at increased risk are, as you also might expect, some of the most common disorders seen in dogs today. They include obesity, cranial cruciate ligament (CCL) ruptures, hip dysplasia, several types of cancer, urine dribbling (incontinence) and cystitis (bladder inflammation). Musculoskeletal Disorders in Desexed Large and Giant Breed Dogs,removing a dog’s ability to produce important hormones while his skeleton is still developing can result in delayed closure of the growth plates at the end of each long bone. This can cause a dog’s legs to grow longer than normal, as you can see in this example of two adult male Golden Retrievers. The big guy on the left is intact, with normal conformation for the breed. The leggier guy on the right was neutered at 5 months and has a quite noticeable longer-limbed conformation. Sadly, even though the taller Golden on the right is certainly as handsome and fit-looking as the dog on the left, his longer limbs may put him a higher risk for orthopedic disease.Labrador and Golden Retrievers neutered before 6 months of age develop one or more joint disorders at two to five times the rate of intact dogs. When it comes to problems with cranial cruciate ligaments, large breed dogs spayed or neutered at under 6 months of age have three times the risk for early life CCL injuries. Dogs desexed at any age have a two to three times higher incidence of CCL disease compared with intact dogs. A study involving several hundred Golden Retrievers, none of the intact dogs had CCL disease; however, 5 percent of neutered males and 7.7 percent of spayed females who were desexed before they were a year old developed CCL injuries. The body condition score was the same for all the dogs, which indicates that changes in the build of the desexed dogs was to blame. Male Golden Retrievers neutered at under 1 year developed hip dysplasia at double the rate of intact males, and the disease also appeared earlier in the desexed dogs. Another study of 40 years of data collected on a range of different dogs desexed at a variety of ages showed a 17 percent increased risk of hip dysplasia.continue