For example, fish oil may reduce inflammation and help prevent certain health conditions like cancer. Hip and joint supplements may help reduce joint pain. Spayed female dogs of any breed have the longest lifespan compared to neutered males or intact male or female dogs. Talk to your vet about the appropriate age to spay your female Bernese Mountain Dog, as spaying a dog too young may cause other problems. You should take your Bernese Mountain Dog to the vet at least once a year for health screening and vaccinations when they are young.
Many health conditions are more manageable if caught early on. You may consider taking your Berner to the vet twice a year once they reach the age of 5 or so. Depending on what parasites are common in your area, you should keep your Berner on regular heartworm, flea and tick, or other preventative treatments to help keep your Berner healthy and free from parasites.
Cheap dog food contains a lot of fillers and artificial ingredients. Sure, it will keep your dog alive, but only up to a point. Feed your Bernese Mountain Dog the best large breed dog food you can to help prevent ailments related to poor nutrition.
While Bernese Mountain Dogs, in general, have short lifespans, all hope is not lost. Anecdote, hearsay and gossip cannot be relied on to give a true reflection especially as these sometimes have their roots in emotional circumstances. The only way to get a proper figure is through breed surveys but even these have to be viewed with a little care. For example, there was a feeling that people who have a precious family member die suddenly at just 3 or 4 years of age are understandably quite upset about this and much more motivated to report it and much more likely to do so.
Contrast this with the owners whose dog dies in its sleep at 11 years of age, still sad but much less distressing and much less likely to be motivated to make the effort to report this in a voluntary survey. The average age at death in this quickly settled and remained fairly constant at around 7 years and I believe was ultimately taken from more than a thousand reported Bernese deaths whether reported directly or taken from reports and tributes.
Whilst much smaller in scale in terms of the numbers of deaths it was set up to be representative for the reasons outlined elsewhere on this web site. In the Bernese section of this our average age at death came out at 7. The three surveys quoted above were all concerned with British dogs but BMD surveys in other countries generally do not give markedly different results to ours and whilst no one is claiming these figures are something we should be satisfied with they may not be as bad as those put about by some quarters.
If you are looking to buy a BMD puppy then ask the breeder about longevity in the lines of the parents. What ages are the grand parents or how old did they live to? What did they die of? What about the uncles and aunties of your puppy, are they all still alive? Some but not all cancers are hereditary or at least have a familial element to them so it is surely common sense to ask about this aspect of the health background of your prospective puppy.
It is common sense that dogs which have lots of long living dogs in their pedigrees are more likely not going have any predispositions to develop the serious conditions which can affect our breed than those with relatives which have died at early ages due to illness.
Surely asking about overall health and longevity is even more important than just asking about hip and elbow scores of parents and ancestors. Overall you can see that BMD longevity is not a straightforward issue as even the surveys need careful interpretation but responsible breeders should be taking this factor into account in some way. The figures produced by the surveys above are the most reliable information you have when assessing our breed and any scaremongering figures derived from elsewhere should not be given undue status but their origins questioned before being accepted.
Most people would agree that longevity in our breed is important and most people would also agree that it needs to improve.
Moreover, a large proportion of diagnoses were of poor or moderate reliability. Possible reasons include unwillingness of owners to confirm diagnoses in cases of presumed poor prognosis, and unwillingness to perform post-mortem examinations in cases in which no specific antemortem diagnosis was evident. In addition, overdiagnosis of neoplasia by veterinarians because of a perceived high risk of tumours in BMDs may have artificially inflated prevalence of neoplasia in this study.
At the same time, some animals with unknown cases of death or those dying with only symptomatic diagnoses may indeed have had undiscovered neoplasia, leading to underestimation of its true prevalence. Besides analyses on the causes of death, the collection of health histories from birth to death, as well as clinical and genetic material for analyses of specific diseases may be valuable to more precisely assess breed health.
Further studies, prospectively collecting health data from defined health populations or cohorts may enable breeding clubs to more accurately assess breed health. This study confirms the high prevalence of neoplasia in BMDs.
Although the prevalence may be overestimated due to the lacking histological or cytological confirmation, neoplasia is an important factor for the low life expectancy in BMDs. The diagnostic accuracy leaves much to be desired and further research on malignant processes with a high diagnostic standard is necessary to improve breed health.
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BMC Vet Res. Download references. Special thanks to Beatriz Vidondo and Marcus G. Doherr for the preliminary data analysis, and to Nathalie Assaf and Martha Cehrs for submitting data and supporting this study.
The data is not shared in publicly available repositories to preserve veterinarian and owner privacy. UG: research question, project management and writing the manuscript. JH: project coordination, data collection and processing.
MR: data collection and preliminary data analysis. MK: data collection, data analysis and drafting the manuscript. All authors have read and approved the final manuscript. UG: Dr. JH: Dr. MR: doctoral student. MK: doctoral student. The study was submitted for approval to the Cantonal Veterinary Services of the Canton of Berne and was determined exempt from the need for review, according to the Swiss Federal Welfare Act of December 16th You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar.
Reprints and Permissions. Klopfenstein, M. Life expectancy and causes of death in Bernese mountain dogs in Switzerland. BMC Vet Res 12, Download citation. Received : 20 November Accepted : 20 July Published : 25 July Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:. Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article. Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative.
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