# Journal Article of Mortality of North American Dogs



## ChiNoodleMan (Mar 16, 2011)

I received an email from my vet the other day and it had a link to an article about a study done on the mortality of dogs and causes of death from 1984 to 2004. Anyway, since I am a nerd and wanted to read the study myself, I logged on and pulled the study from the Journal of Veterinary Internal Medicine (glad that graduate school money I am paying gets me more than an education). If you don't feel like reading the long winded response, you can skip to the bottom.

Anyway, after reading through it, it's a little morbid, but interesting nonetheless. (I definitely cannot wait to get home from work to see my dogs today and give them some love.) I though some people might find it a little interesting too since we are all chihuahua lovers here. I would post it online for anyone to check out, but I am not sure of the legality of that and don't want The Man on my back. So, if you have questions about any other breeds, let me know. By the way, Google is great for some of these terms. I am in finance and getting my MBA in pharmaceutical and healthcare business and I had to check out some of this stuff to get a firm grasp on things.

The results are actually pretty good for the little Chihuahuas. The study had data for 573 Chihuahua deaths from 1984 - 2004. A breakdown of the causes of death were:

By Organ System
Cardiovascular: 18.5% (3rd highest of all breeds studied)
Dermatologic: 2.4%
Endocrine: 2.3%
Gastrointestinal:11% 
Hematopoietic: 2.6%
Hepatic: 1.9%
Musculoskeletal: 7.0%
Neurologic: 13.3%
Ophthalmologic: 1.0%
Respiratory: 7.2%
Urogenital: 8.7%
Unclassified: 24.1%

Everything, by organ system seems average or below, except the cardiovascular system. I am too lazy to put this in Excel format to get a better reading feel as to where the Chihuahua stacks up for each system, but maybe if I have free time tonight, I will. 

Within Pathophysiologic Process
Congenital: 5.1%
Degenerative: 7.2%
Infectious: 10.5%
Inflammatory: 1.4%
Metabolic: 6.5%
Neoplastic: 7.5% (Third lowest of any breed. This is the main one for the vast majority of breeds.)
Toxic: 1.0%
Traumatic: 16.8%
Vascular: 0.9%
Unclassified: 43.3%

There is a rounding issue here where these add up to 100.3%, but I checked over and over. Crazy scientists and their rounding. haha. These show that traumatic issues are the main cause, followed by infectious. In other words, we need to watch the little ones to make sure their bravery doesn't get them in trouble, nor do outsiders who don't realize how delicate they are.

There is data that looks at all dogs by age and causes and systems and such, but that isn't worth too much since it isn't segmented by breed. Overall though, it does show that traumatic death decreases substantially after year one for all breeds. Cardiovascular is high the first year (about 12%) and then drops to about 8% in year 2 and then increases to 10% at 10 years old. After that, it decreases ever so slightly. The study doesn't list age breakdowns to see how many total dogs lived after 10, so this could be a misleading statistic, but the data supports it and I will too haha.

Sorry for the long post and being a little nerdy, but I will try to summarize here:

*Summary*

The leading cause of death in North American Chihuahuas from 1984-2004, by organ system affected, was Cardiovascular disease (heart and blood vessels). However, among all breeds, the trend is that it occurred most frequently in the first year before dropping. Then from 2 to 10, it increases until it levels off (and decreases ever so slightly).

When looking at the cause of death by process, traumatic (example would be a fall off a counter or jumping out of arms) causes were the leading cause for Chihuahuas.

The study is not anything earth shattering or even that surprising to us who know how delicate the dogs are. I just thought it would be worth sharing. The only thing we are to do is love them, keep them safe from doing their fearless tricks that could hurt them, get their vet checkups and keep them healthy with nutritious food. If you do that, you are doing all you can.


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## michele (Jan 12, 2009)

I'm from uk but it was interesting thanks for info


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## Brodysmom (Jan 8, 2009)

Very interesting. Thanks for posting!


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