Pet Pawfection

My Human Mama's Shelby, Taken By Cancer

November is National Pet Cancer Awareness Month. VPI Pet Insurance declared it as such in 2005 to "empower pet owners with knowledge about the prevalence, detection and treatment of pet cancer." Cancer does not discriminate. It kills humans and pets. My human mama's furry friend Shelby, a beautiful hound mix, died of cancer a few years ago. There are countless stories of lost loved ones and those who won their fights. We celebrate those victories as we continue the struggle to save as many lives as possible.

VPI is doing its part this month by donating $1 for every new Like of the VPI Facebook page. For those of you in the Long Beach, California area, the fifth annual VPI K9K Pet Cancer Awareness Walk will take place on November 15, 2011. All registration fees will be donated directly to the Animal Cancer Foundation.

A recent discovery at North Carolina State University provided some good news in the fight against cancer. Researchers found that chromosomal "breakpoints" in canines are associated with cancer. So what are breakpoints?

When new species evolve, they leave genetic evidence behind in the form of "breakpoint regions." These regions are sites on the genome where chromosomes broke during speciation (when new species of dogs developed). Dr. Matthew Breen, professor of genomics at NC State, and graduate student Shannon Becker looked at the breakpoint regions that occurred when the canid (dog) species differentiated during evolution. They compared the genomes of several wild canine species with those of the domestic dog. By overlaying the genomes, they found shared breakpoints among 11 different canid species -- the so-called evolutionary breakpoints. [Science Daily]

Interestingly enough, these "breakpoint regions" are the same regions associated with chromosome breaks in spontaneously occurring cancers. According to Dr. Breen, "It is possible that the re-arrangement of chromosomes that occurred when these species diverged from one another created unstable regions on the chromosome, and that is why these regions are associated with cancer."

This discovery may lead to more effective treatment of both canine and human cancers. Visit Science Daily for more information about the study. Your help with VPI's National Pet Cancer Awareness Month could lead to more discoveries like this!

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