9 Apr 2025
ConNeCT Study sees researchers join forces to investigate congenital heart disease in newborns lost to neonatal death.
Paul Imrie
Job Title
Image © Erik Lam / Adobe Stock
Primary care vets are being sought to support a national study seeking to uncover congenital heart disease’s role in unexplained puppy deaths.
The ConNeCT Study – or officially the “The Prevalence of Congenital Heart Disease in Puppies Suffering Unexplained Neonatal Death based on micro-CT imaging” – wants to find out how structural heart defects contribute to early-life mortality in dogs.
It is led by a collaboration involving Bristol Vet Specialists, the University of Cambridge, Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health and Eastcott Veterinary Referrals, and is supported by The Kennel Club.
It will apply cutting-edge micro-CT scanning to examine hearts in puppies dying in the first four weeks, including still-births.
Caroline Cutler, ACVIM resident in cardiology, and the study’s lead investigator, said: ”In human medicine, congenital heart defects are a well-recognised cause of infant death – but in dogs, they remain largely invisible.
“Many puppy deaths could be simply labelled as ‘fading puppy syndrome’, but we suspect congenital heart disease may be a major, under-recognised contributor. If this is the case, we may be breeding heritable heart disease into our canine population without even being aware – the impact on puppy welfare could be far larger than we realise.”
The team wants UK primary care vets to take part by submitting postmortem heart and lung specimens from puppies that had died unexpectedly and identified through routine clinic caseload or via dog breeders.
Resources are available online, including a step-by-step pictorial guide for tissue collection and fixation, owner information and consent forms and details of securely recording case details.
Tissue collection takes 15 to 20 minutes, samples will be anonymised and securely handled and no personal data will be shared between the practices or research centres.
All clinics submitting will be acknowledged in presentations and publications arising from the work.
Kieran Borgeat, cardiology consultant at Bristol Vet Specialists and the project’s supervising author, said: “The good will and effort of primary vets that are able to submit samples to us is essential to making this study work – it will simply not be possible without collaboration.”
Full details are online or by emailing [email protected]
