My five month olf GSD has a monorchid testicle which means that only one ball has dropped. I was wondering if anyone has dealt with this issue before and might have any recommendations. My vet does not want to operate and find the missing ball because he says it is like 'searching for a needle in a haystack' but every other vet tells me to find and remove it when I spay him. I love my vet but everyone disagrees. I just want to do what is best and safest for the pup. My vet has been practicing for 45 years and I have been going to him for ten years but now I am starting to question him.

There was a thread about this just the other day. Someone posted that the shy nut does NOT have an increased chance of cancer. . .or something like that.

Search the archives.


I think it was Chris, maybe he'll respond again?

I had a dog that had the same issue. My vet waited until he was one year old to see if it would finally drop, which it didn't. He then advised that he would have to go in and remove it because of the risk of cancer. And of course when he went in for the trapped one he took the good one also. No sense passing on the bad genes.

pet peeve..

Mono= one ... As in there is only one PERIOD.
Crypt= hidden.. which is what you are talking about.

Mon/orchid/ism= one/testicle/condition of
Crypt/orchid/ism = hidden/testicle/condition of

They are two totally different defects.

OK, now that we have that out of the way... LOL

Nuts and ... uh,.... bolts

Compared to dogs with normal testicles, retained testicles have a 9 times (in one study) to 14 times (in another study) increased risk of developing tumors. On top of the increased risk of tumor formation, it's presumably more difficult to detect tumors in retained testicles.

Laura Sanborn

I think that thread lost the last half of the posts when the site was down. It was the one from Chris that I was thinking of.

The only studies I'm aware of showing an increased risk of cancer with retained testicles were conducted back in the 70's and are full of experimental flaws (despite the lack of ability to detect many - now detectable tumors.

The types of tumors found in retained testicles do differ from those found in normally descended testicles, but there is no good conclusive evidence that the overall risk of tumors is increased.

Vets will give the same "remove to reduce the risk of cancer" regardless of whether or not testicles have dropped.

Retained testicles will not produce viable sperm, but they will produce normal androgens - importnat for correct muscle and bone growth.

If you are planning on fixing a dog anyway, it makes sense to remove a retained testicle as well.

It's easy to do a literature search on this sort of thing. The National Library of Medicine search engine is only slightly more difficult to use than Google.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi

Teratology. 1985 Aug;32(1):51-6.
Canine cryptorchism and subsequent testicular neoplasia: case-control study with epidemiologic update.
Hayes HM Jr, Wilson GP, Pendergrass TW, Cox VS.
A retrospective study of 2,912 cryptorchid dogs identified 14 breeds with significantly high risk. Among six distinct closely interrelated breed groups (e.g., toy, miniature, and standard poodles), the risk in the smaller breed was always greater than that in the larger relative, suggesting that genetically influenced maldescent could be, in part, related to physical size or the rate of growth of the involved structures. Testicular tumors were diagnosed in 5.7% of the cryptorchid dogs; half had only Sertoli cell tumors, one-third had only seminomas. The relative risk for Sertoli cell tumor or seminoma was not directly related to a familial risk for cryptorchism. Using the health experience of a control population composed of male dogs with anal sac disease (N = 4,184), there is an estimated relative risk of 9.2 in cryptorchid dogs to develop a testis tumor (95% confidence interval, 5.9-14.3) and 4.2 in dogs with inguinal hernia (95% confidence interval, 1.8-9.5). Considering that the anatomical development of the genital tract, testis descent, and tunic relationships in dog are very similar to that in man, and that the associations of cryptorchism and inguinal hernia with testis neoplasms are also similar, the dog should be an excellent model system to further investigate the causes of human cryptorchism.

Int J Cancer. 1976 Oct 15;18(4):482-7.
Canine testicular tumors: epidemiologic features of 410 dogs.
Hayes HM Jr, Pendergrass TW.
Histologically confirmed testicular tumors were diagnosed in 410 dogs from 12 North American veterinary university hospitals and clinics. Three tumor-cell types, Sertoli cell tumor, interstitial cell tumor and seminoma, were about equally represented. Several breeds were identified with high risk for different testicular tumor-cell types. Cytogenetic and immunogenetic studies of these dog families could offer leads applicable to familial testicular cancer in man. The multiplicity of breeds within the series suggests that, as in man, other factors, in addition to hereditary, play a role in etiology. Cryptorchid dogs appear to have a 13.6 times higher risk of testicular tumor than normal dogs. Additionally, male dogs with an inguinal hernia have an increased risk (4.7) of testis tumors. There were no detectable excesses of other urogenital anomalies or urogenital tumors among the series. The Shetland Sheepdog is suggested as an appropriate model for research into the mechanisms responsible for testicular maldescent and tumorigenesis.

I am fairly familiar with search engines related to the life sciences, and the two abstracts you posted are prime examples of my objections to the conclusions for increased risk - one from the mid-70's when our knowledge and understanding of the onset of cancers was dramatically more primative than it is today, and another study whose conclusions are based on an epidemiological study with inappropriate controls. When you want to draw conclusions from research articles it is often helpful to read more than just the abstract.

First, I didn't conclude anything simply from the abstracts. I simply pointed out how one can go about finding this information, for those who may not know. Over 5000 people are subscribed to this forum. If one is curious, one can go to a medical library (as I have done) and look up the full journal articles that the database search finds.

These studies were published in peer-reviewed medical journals. The peer review process, while not perfect, involves knowledgeable experts reviewing the protocols of studies to determine if, for example, controls were adequate.

Also, the notion that medical studies done in the 70's & 80's are automatically obsolete because medical science has advanced by leaps and bounds since that time is nonsense. In some areas it most certainly has, but not across the board. For diagnosing whether a tumor is in a dog's testicle, and the basics of conducting simple epidemiological studies, I fail to see why studies of this type conducted 20-30+ years ago would be any less valid than those done today.

These are not studies involving an understanding of how cancers start, or how they grow. Nor is it about cancer treatments. Any of these could be obsolete over a span of 20-30+ years.

In this case it is merely a matter of: are testicular tumors present in the study dogs, yes or no, and what things (like cryptorchidism) are correlated with whether these tumors are there or not.

Laura Sanborn