I recently found out that there was a study conducted where they found out spaying/neutering can have negative effects on larger breed dogs if done before they are fully grown (german shepherds, golden retrievers, and labs) who are already at risk for hip dysplasia. It supposedly puts them at risk for certain cancers and obesity as well. What is your opinion on the subject if you wouldnt mind giving it?
It’s complicated.
I’ve written in depth about the topic here a year ago, and there’s not much for me to add at this stage.
What I really wish the general pet owning public understood is that the end result is not “Desexing is bad” it’s just questioning the optimal timing. I am of the opinion that we should still be routinely desexing dogs, it’s just a matter of deciding when.
It’s important to understand the relative risk of all the different conditions included in the discussion. It’s one thing for an article to claim “Desexing triples the risk of osteosarcoma!” (bone cancer) to get views, but when you go look at the data and see the osteosarcoma risk went from 1% to 3% but the mammary cancer risk went from 26% to 0.05% you have to weigh up which is more important to you.
For example, a little chihuahua that might potentially live to 18 is at significant risk of mammary cancer if not desexed, but bugger all risk of osteosarcoma. An Irish Wolfhound, with their unfortunately short life expectancy of around 8 is probably not going to live long enough to get mammary cancer, but it’s certainly at risk of osteosarcoma.
Hip dysplasia is an entirely different issue and it’s a weak argument against desexing. If there is a risk, I generally recommend PennHIP screening Xrays at about 16 weeks of age, and a juvenile pubic symphysiodesis(JPS) if those hips are found to be lax. We can actually detect hip dysplasia that young, and if the hip laxity is there, I’d rather do something preventative for a condition the dog already has right now instead of trying to improve the odds of a condition it might potentially have one day in the future.
All of the studies so far have been retrospective. This means that it’s not a designed, controlled experiment, it’s scouring medical records of large hospitals and looking for trends. This is still useful, but there’s a number of factors that might be interfering with results. The studies I’ve read generally don’t report the average age of death for the dogs either, which is what I’m really interested in. If one group got cancer but lived significantly longer than the other, that would make recommendations easier to make.
As for obesity, we already know that removing an animal’s reproductive system reduces its energy requirements by about 10%. Agriculture has taken advantage of this for the longest time - castrated males turn their food into meat most efficiently- but the same seems to hold true for roughly any animal.
10% gain in body weight is not obesity. 40%, 50% or more gain in body weight generally is, and that’s not blamable on desexing, especially when it happens in the few months after skeletal maturity.
So still desex your dogs, but have that conversation with your vet about when.
