From:
Sukie Crandall
Date: 2003-05-03 01:01:05 UTC
Subject: Re: early neuter, adrenal? and young ferret issues...
To: ferrethealth@smartgroups.com
Cc: juliegambone@hotmail.com
Message-id: <a05210606bad8c257acb0@[10.0.1.12]>
I am very sorry to read of your young one with lymphoma. We had one
with Juvenile Lymphoma a great many years ago; that particular
variant is rare but it is so heartbreaking and it does progress
rapidly. Those cases show up sporadically in ferrets from anywhere.
If you have not picked up a copy of the issue of "Ferrets" which has
an EXCELLENT article by veterinary pathologist, Dr. Bruce Williams in
it on the forms of lymphoma, I highly recommend that as an accurate
source of readily attainable information.
It must now be very frustrating and scary to worry about this second one.
Although there aren't hard numbers out there it looks most likely
that NON-neutered ferrets rarely get adrenal growths and then most of
them are at older ages. This indicates that neutering may play a
role, but it may not indicate any difference between early neuters
and later neuters.
I have to wonder if that role is larger among the current ferrets
than past ones.
Here is why. Steve and I have had ferrets in our family for going on
21 years with only one of the permanent residents not being early
neuters, and we spoke with many people with ferrets back then. Plus,
we have had a number of people who had U.S. ferrets long ago say the
same thing to us. What have they said? They've said that they never
or rarely heard or knew then of ferrets with adrenal neoplasia or
insulinoma, and that includes the ones who were early neuters and
were fed kibbles (no special foods back then so whatever cat food was
around was what was usually fed). We were seeing most common ages of
death that are similar to now back then, though the range for the
most common age range increased by something like 6 to 9 months for a
while in our family (then got pulled back down a bit by two young
ones with lympho and one with a serious set of deformities) so these
were not animals who were dying before those medical problems could
show up.
Why didn't people notice or remark on these problems then? No one
knows. Do the fancy genetic alleles that are spread around so much
these days play into it, perhaps by introducing a vulnerability that
interacts badly with another factor such as early neutering? Do the
more recently ever-around lights on so many things play a part by
decreasing night darkness and if so by how much? Is there maybe a
viral trigger which affects development some when other conditions
are right? Is it simply possible that people then who had ferrets who
went bald and the vets who treated them thought that it was just from
age so didn't make mention of it? We ran into that assumption for a
while with our first adrenal neoplasia case in an elderly chocolate
male.
What I recall as a distinctly separate thing was the reporting of
early adrenal growths, and the timing for these seems to fit more
with when I noticed a lot of those fancy genetics being around and
those lights on everything being around. Does my noticing them at
about the same time mean anything? Not necessarily but maybe. There
are too many unknowns to draw conclusions. (I do know personally --
small sample so it doesn't necessarily mean anything -- that our only
early adrenal case, as in younger than 5 years, happened during a
time when we stopped providing a lot of night darkness for a long
number of months, though we might be starting a second early one
despite providing darkness but even the vet is unsure with him right
now.)
BTW, fancy genetics were popularized mostly by private breeders when
they first were making their appearance, and to some extent by a
mid-sized farm, while other farm sources have later joined in to
satisfy the demand for fancies and as still are some private
breeders. Also, as other people have noted in the past there are
stores and distributors that simply won't buy non-fancies which also
play a large role in preventing this problem from being as
constructively addressed as it should be. For more information on
some of these genetic disorders I suggest reading the past posts of
geneticist, Brett Middleton in the Complete Archives. He will be
speaking on this at the Ferret Symposium in Atlanta in October (info
at http://www.ferretcongress.org ).
There was a study done in the Netherlands to determine if adrenal
disease was present. It was and it was not rare. Their study served
the purpose for which it was designed very well.
The authors thought that they might also be noticing a pattern
between age of neutering and onset of adrenal disease, but the
sampling type used and other factors made their study not a good one
from which to draw such conclusions and the standard deviation was
absolutely huge as I recall. I can't remember what it was but you
could drive a bus through it. This is not the fault of the
researchers or even a fault type of thing. They simply weren't
planning to look for that sort of thing so the study was designed
with a different question in mind, but they happened to come up with
something which gave rise to a new question -- whether there is a
correlation between age of neutering and age of on-set of adrenal
neoplasia -- and being responsible and logical they mentioned that
this is worth further inquiry, as it is.
So, does neutering play into adrenal neoplasia? My gut feeling at
this time is that it does. Does neutering at anything less than a
year or more make any difference? At this point my gut feeling is to
doubt that it may, but I am only human and if I had a nickle for
every time I've been wrong I'd have one heck of a lot of nickels,
just like anyone else. I'm waiting for more data to exist before
drawing any conclusions but in the meantime I think it does make
sense for people to notice the hypotheses that most appeal to them
and try them as long as they are safe ones, while all the while
remembering that these are only hypotheses so that needless guilty
feelings don't arise if some hypotheses simply don't pan out as is
inevitable.
Anyway, that is just my take on it for whatever it is worth or not worth.