Reply To: Epilepsy in Border Collies

[jessica hekman]

Thanks for bringing this up, Beth. The issue with crowdfunding individual studies like this is the sample size we need. We’d need hundreds (ideally a couple thousand) border collies, and we’d need to be pretty confident that we knew which ones were affected. Since epilepsy can be later onset this would mean the controls would all have to be at least 5-7 years old. Collecting that number of dogs is a massive amount of work. If a breed club were interested in working with us, that might be the way to go – they could do the sample collection and we could do the sequencing and analysis.

Let me know if you want to talk about this more.

Best,
Jessica Hekman, DVM, PhD
Darwin’s Ark Researcher