Pennhip or OFA - Page 2

     PennHip does not grade on a rubric of excellent good, fair, etc. It measures on a distraction index. And gives a reading for each hip. My dogs hips   were  .35 and .39, Then they take the higher score and round off to the nearest ten percent. My dog's was 40%. So My dogs hips are better than 60% of all the GSD;s they have done.  The only problem with the numbers is that it is still a statistically small sample. It is large enough to use reliably but many breeders feel that number of GSD's in the database is still too small. My understanding is that PennHIp offered their method free of charge to OFA a long while ago. Not sure of those details.Ten years ago, I spoke to the GSD breeder, at length,  whose GSD's were used to develop the method. Since I have done OFA prlims(good) and PennHip, I probably won't do anymore on my dog since I am not a breeder.

Shepherd Woman, you can do an O.F.A. pre-lim before 2 years to try and get an idea how the hips look however the 'Official" O.F.A. xray can not be published until an xray is submitted at 2 years of age. The average PennHip rating for the breed is 0.40, the lower the number, the tighter the hips. A 0.30 would put your dog in the 90th% range meaning that your dogs hips are tighter than 90% of all GSD's. Both hips are evaluated individually, if one hip is 0.30 and the other is 0.40 the higher number (0.40) is used, the scores are not averaged.
What I like most about PennHIP is that you can evaluate as early as 4 months of age. What you get at 4 months (baring injury) you are 96% sure of getting at 2 years of age. What you get at 6 months you are 100% sure of getting at 2 years. I think it's great to know what the hips look like at a young age, it will also save you a lot of heartache if you invest years of time and money into a dog only to find out that their hips are not breed worthy, or may cause the dog problems in the future.

If you go to the PennHIP site it will give you a clear explanation as to what they do.
http://www.pennhip.org/

* I have NEVER had a dog with a PennHIP reading of 0.40 or lower fail to O.F.A. Good.
* I have seen dogs that are O.F.A. fair or good totally crap out with a PennHIP, simply put the hips are as loose as they are, you can't hide it with positioning like you can with an O.F.A. or "a" stamp xray. Also the vet MUST submit the xray, you and your vet can not look at the xray and decide not to send it in, the vet would loose their PennHIP affiliation if it were found out. O.F.A. and "a" stamp xrays are not submitted on a regular basis.

Here's a link to a good article by Fred Lanting comparing O.F.A. and PennHip. http://www.angelfire.com/de3/jagenstadt/LookingAtOFA.html

Read up on it, there are many conflicting opinions.

Best of luck

A friend of mine had his dog's hips xrayed by his local vet.  The vet told him the hips looked bad to him, and he didn't think she'd pass.  He said "What the H***... send 'em in anyway."  So the vet did.  The results came back and my friend was very pleasantly surprised with an OFA "Good"!  So don't always take your vet's word for it.

Send them in and see what the OFA vets say.

I have had a dog PennHip evaluated at one year at slightly below the GSD median in hip laxity (Her scores: 4.2 and 4.6, GSD median score =4.0) , who later came back at two years with OFA good hips.  Apparently they did tighten up some between one and two years of age.

Veronica