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.html http://www.miamiferret.org/ http://www.ferrethealth.msu.edu/ http://www.ferretcongress.org/ http://www.trifl.org/index.shtml http://homepage.mac.com/sukie/sukiesferretlinks.html [Posted in FML 6355]