Wayne Potts Laboratory has been funded by the Canine Health Foundation to study the relationship between major histocompatability alleles and the following auto-immune diseases in canines: immune mediated hemolytic anemia, diabetes and immune mediated thyroiditisis. We are currently seeking candidate animals for participation in this study. If your dog is purebred and has any of the aforementioned diseases it may qualify for this study. Please carefully review the following criteria for study participation. If your animal is a potential candidate, please print out a copy of the Consent Form , have it filled out by your veterinarian and returned to:

Wayne Potts Canine Health Study
Department of Biology
University of Utah
257 South 1400 East
Salt Lake City, Utah   84112

We will review your consent form, and if your dog is deemed qualified for participation in this study, you will be sent a home DNA sample collection kit. Click here for more information about DNA sample collection.

If you would like more information about this study please feel free to read the study abstract.

Thank you for your interest.

Autoimmune diseases cause significant amounts of mortality and debilitating disease in dogs. In humans many autoimmune diseases occur only in individuals expressing one of the few predisposing histocompatibility genes. For example, all cases of type I diabetes in humans are associated with only a few of the many allelic forms of class II histocompatibility genes. Consequently, if the frequencies of these few alleles were reduced by half, the incidence of diabetes would be reduced by half. Here we propose to characterize histocompatibility susceptibility alleles for three major, heritable canine autoimmune diseases - diabetes, immune-mediated thyroiditis and immune-mediated hemolytic anemia. If any of these three debilitating (or lethal) autoimmune diseases have a restricted number of susceptibility alleles it will allow: (1) development of diagnostic tests for identifying individuals at risk for prophylactic therapy and research and (2) reducing the incidence of the disease by reducing the breeding of individuals carrying the predisposing histocompatibility alleles. For each of the three autoimmune diseases, we propose to collect DNA samples from approximately 100 purebred dogs diagnosed with the disease. Histocompatibility genes will be cloned and sequenced for each dog for a total of approximately 1100 sequences. Histocompatibility alleles will be tested for significant associations with each of the autoimmune diseases.

We use a simple cheek swab method for DNA collection that may be performed at home by the dog owner. This is a routine procedure for DNA sample collection and presents effectively no risk to your dog.

*Important note: all envelopes, cytology brush wrappers, and consent forms are pre-numbered to prevent sample misidentification. Prevention of such misidentification will most effectively be achieved if all collection for a given patient is fully complete before opening another packet and collecting from the next patient.