Inheritance of canine hip dysplasia: review of estimation methods and of heritability estimates and prospects on further developments.

Canine hip dysplasia is a long-known, widespread degenerative skeletal disease. A hereditary component of hip dysplasia was assumed early, although attempts to explain hip dysplasia with known Mendelian modes of inheritance did not sufficiently fit the data observed. Nevertheless, both recessive and dominant modes of inheritance were proposed. Later on, it was proposed that CHD was determined in a multifactorial way. Both the influence of many genes and environmental effects were assumed to affect the development of CHD. More recently, this thesis was supplemented and refined, as a major gene was detected as a cause of CHD in addition to a polygenic component. Nowadays, projects are under way with the aim to locate quantitative trait loci (QTL) significantly linked to CHD, and ultimately to develop gene tests to identify carriers of genes responsible for CHD.