# Recommended age for OFA or Penn Hips tests



## maggs30 (Aug 5, 2008)

Ok so I have my female Dogue De Bourdeaux that I will be breeding in the next year or so and I am already looking at options for the stud. I am so Po'd at some of the breeder sites that I look at because like GSD's DDB's have HD and bloat issues. Everytime I find a male I like that has excellent hips I find other things wrong with the breeder. I may never breed her if I can't find a male with a breeder I approve of! LOL! So I finally found a male good solid temperament, good structure excellent Penn Hip scores, but the Penn Hip was done at 22 weeks old! That is not normal to me! Isn't it usually done closer to 18-24 months old? Will the scores change drastically from 5 months to 18-24 months old? I ask this because this particular "breeder", and I say that loosely, is breeding 2 females with confirmed HD! That I see after seeing their claim that their kennel has the best rated hips in the US! [rollseyes]. So I will not be having him stud the litter but I was wondering about the changes that take place in the hips from 5 months to 18 months and if I should run far froom any breeder that has hip scores from under a certain age?

Thanks all!

Oh and to add on a happy note my girl is 18 1/2 weeks old, 50 pounds, and has the perfect stop, straight back, chest depth, and she is conforming nicely to standard. [crossfingers] that her future hip, elbow, and eye tests go well.










Kiyoko and Riley when she was 15 weeks old.









And the perfect conformation face! Such a sweetie too!


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## littledmc17 (Apr 9, 2008)

2 years old and make sure the person doing the penn hip knows what they are doing.

I had B's done and the moron didn't know what she was doing


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## cliffson1 (Sep 2, 2006)

How would a lay person be able to ensure that the person doing the Pennhipp knows what they are doing. Most people barely know Pennhipp, probably don't know the exact procedures, and barely understand the results when given back to them if not explained by the moron that did the test. Incredible!!


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## angelaw (Dec 14, 2001)

With pennhip the doctors are trained to do it. You have to find a certified penn hip vet to do it. Directory is on their website : http://research.vet.upenn.edu/pennhip/LocateaPennHIPVet/tabid/3539/Default.aspx

It's not like you could go to the corner vet and say do this please. 

From the above site:
PennHIP has studied the efficacy of this method from the eight weeks up to three years of age. The PennHIP method can be reliably performed on a dog as young as 16 weeks old. Passive hip laxity at 16 weeks correlates highly with later hip laxity. In other words, a dog's hip laxity at 16 weeks will be much the same at one year, two years or even three years. The accuracy of laxity measurements for German Shepherd Dogs less than 16 weeks of age is not high enough to be of clinical use. Other breeds require study to determine the earliest reliable age of evaluation.


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## Chris Wild (Dec 14, 2001)

OFA of course is 2 years. I don't know on PennHip. They say breed specific studies are needed to know how early PennHip evaluation is valuable, and since a DDB is a pretty uncommon dog I'd imagine they don't have a large enough representative sample of that breed to have done that. I'd still think 22 weeks is too young to really be valuable and would consider it like an OFA prelim. Gives enough info to know if the dog has potential and is worth growing out as possible breeding stock, but too earlly to make final determination. Though if you called UPenn and asked, they may be able to tell you more info specific to that breed.


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## maggs30 (Aug 5, 2008)

Thank you for all the replies. I have done a lot of study into reading the Penn Hip results and everything and I know what I require of the stud for my pup. The problem still lies though in how early. Thank you for the responses, maybe calling UPenn they may have an answer for DDB because the are still very uncommon in the US and from what I am seeing.....they are being breed poorly here so far







My girls parents had excellent ratings with the stud being almost at the 100 percentile and the bitch at 80 to 85 percentile. I know I do not want to go backwards in the hip area so any stud is gonna have to have 90 percent or better. Told hubby he was lucky I wasn't this picky when I picked a mate for myself


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