You already know that periodontal disease and heart disease are a
"which came first" problem which may vary across individuals. Why?
Because certain types (not all) of bacteria that live in the mouths of
humans (and I seem to recall that one or two of those genera can also
live in ferret mouths but I could be totally misremembering) can also
cause problems for human hearts if in the blood stream so perhaps they
also can for ferrets. Alternatively, poor circulation from heart
disease is thought to be able to set the stage for periodontal disease.
So, either can happen first.
Now there is a new wrinkle. Rather than looking at either as being the
cause of the other a team in Germany has discovered that the two can
have a genetic cause in common:
http://www.ivanhoe.com/channels/p_channelstory.cfm?storyid=21561
Whether this will also be the case for those ferrets who get
periodontal disease is unclear.
(In about 28 years with ferrets we have had one ferret who had
periodontal disease, a female with many major genetic problems against
her who developed 8 serious health problems in her last half year -- 5
of which were separate terminal conditions including heart tumor and
cardiomyopathy -- and wound up needing a mostly liquid diet due to a
constricted esophagus, developing periodontal disease in her final
months.)
The German team that was looking to see if periodontal disease and
heart disease could arise from a SHARED genetic trigger found one on
Chromosome 9. There are other shared risk factors for periodontal
disease and cardiac disease from previous studies: age, diabetes,
obesity (We all know that in some households ferrets get too little
exercise and do become obese.), and smoking (It would be interesting to
see if side-stream smoke has an effect since humans and ferrets have
many similar health responses to secondhand smoke, so that may be yet
another reason to not have ferrets around smoking.)
>SOURCE: Study presented on May 25, 2009 at the annual conference of
>the European Society of Human Genetics
Sukie (not a vet)
Recommended ferret health links:
http://pets.groups.yahoo.com/group/ferrethealth/http://ferrethealth.org/archive/http://www.afip.org/ferrets/index.htmlhttp://www.miamiferret.org/http://www.ferrethealth.msu.edu/http://www.ferretcongress.org/http://www.trifl.org/index.shtmlhttp://homepage.mac.com/sukie/sukiesferretlinks.html
[Posted in FML 6355]
