Recording Health Data More Clearly

Please note that the changes outlined here will be rolled out gradually across the individual Breed Archives. If the archive of your favourite breed still looks old-fashioned, please bear with us — it will soon be updated with the new look.

We have revised the health information in dog profiles to improve consistency and enable better use for statistics and search functions.

What exactly has changed?

There is still a distinction between breed-relevant health information and other health issues and screening results. However, health information that already appears in the breed-relevant section will no longer be duplicated under other health issues.

Always specify results

Until now, there was no option to select ‘free’ or ‘not free’ for most of the health issues listed under ‘Other health issues…’ (with the exception of (DNA) tests). Our original assumption was that selecting a health issue implied that the dog has or had the condition. However, we found that many users selected a condition but then noted in the comments that the dog did *not* have the disorder.

We have now made this clearer: in principle, all health information requires a result to be specified — in most cases simply ‘free’ or ‘not free’ — so that the entry is unambiguous and cannot lead to misunderstandings. The only exceptions are entries from the categories ‘Accidents and Injuries’, ‘Neoplasms: benign tumours and malignant tumours (cancer)’, and ‘Poisoning and Overdoses’, as a result of ‘free’ does not make sense in these cases.

Multiple results per health examination now grouped and sorted chronologically

Some examinations and tests are meaningful to repeat over a dog’s lifetime, such as heart and eye examinations, and in certain circumstances also hip examinations — especially if the first examination was carried out at a very young age.

In addition, cancerous tumours can be treated successfully through surgery or other therapies but may recur later.

To make this clearer and more accurate, it is now possible to add multiple results for the same test, examination, or disease — provided that you include the date so that results can be sorted chronologically.

In general, we recommend always entering the date of an examination, test, or onset of illness; however, once more than one result is recorded for the same health entry, the date becomes mandatory.

Migration notes

We have mapped all existing health information that previously had no result to either ‘not free’ or ‘free’, based on what you had written in the notes field. As these notes could only be evaluated automatically to a limited extent and were sometimes contradictory, incorrect mappings may have occurred.

Please check your dog entries to ensure the mapping is correct and adjust them if necessary. Users who made such entries have also received an email asking them to review their data. Thank you for your cooperation.

We would also like to point out that we had to delete entries under ‘Other health issues and screening results’ where a list of results was already available but ‘unknown’ had been selected. In cases where multiple entries existed for the same health information without a date, only the most recently created entry was retained.

We thank you for your help and are confident that this migration and reorganisation will provide a solid foundation for the future collection and documentation of important health information for our beloved dog breeds.