It is a well known fact today that suffering due to skin disorders is one of the most common causes to veterinary calls. For the Doberman breed included in the group of working dogs, the frequency and distribution of the different skinrelated diagnoses that causes visits to the veterinary clinics remains undocumented. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the frequency of skinrelated problems causing veterinary visits of Doberman at four different veterinaryclinics in Sweden retrospectively, and compare these results with dogs in general and three other working dog breeds with the help of information collected from Agria - a Swedish animal insurance company.
The total amount of veterinary calls that were registered at the clinics in question during the time of the study was 2460 visits. From these, 658 visits were due to skinrelated disorders, which amount to 27%. The most frequent cause to skinsuffering was injury caused by trauma, 15,7% of the Dobermans that were included in the study were affected, the second most frequent cause was inflammatory and infectious skin problems with 12,3% followed by neoplastic changes in the skin with 7% of the Dobermans affected. The ten most frequentindividual diagnoses were bite-injury, acute superficial pyoderma, hypothyroidism, unspecific traumatic injury, acute otitis externa, furunculosis, lipoma, abscess and unspecific neoplastic changes to the skin.
Investigation of the insurancedatabase from Agria reveals that Dobermans are affected twice as frequent with skinrelated problems as dogs in general, it was also observed that Dobermans were affected more frequently than the breeds Riesenschnauzer, Malinois and Tervueren that were chosen as comparing breeds of working dogs. The only category of skinrelated problems where Dobermans were diagnosed less frequently than dogs in general was inflammatory and infectious diseas...
