Johnson: Hyper dog may have gut microbia

Maybe it’s the short or near absent attention span, the frenzied activity level that never seems to taper, an inability to listen, follow or retain instructions or exert any self control even in the face of negative consequences.

No matter how much you love them, dote on, train or correct them, they jump on people, tear around the house like it’s a race track, ping impulsively from one thing to another, feverishly destroy toys, important possessions or even the house itself, they have no apparent sense of boundaries, rules or

In search of ponies

expectations, and when it comes down to it, they just don’t seem to care.

Bad dog!

Kind of …

In dogs, the tendency is to simply say the animal is hyper, just plain bad or lacks training, and in some cases there may be truth in such judgments — maybe the pooch hasn’t had proper guidance or training or perhaps its people indulge or fail to correct undesirable behaviors.

Certainly, there are behavior issues that are cultivated and permitted to fester as a result of a pet parent’s failure to adequately and consistently address them.

Not altogether different, the same conclusions are often reached about humans and when it comes to figuring out what causes hyperactive behavior, nurture tends to get a lot more flack than nature.

There are, however dogs genuinely influenced by a force greater than themselves, a powerful force, which drives them to be hyper, difficult to manage, challenging to train and, in short, hard to live with.

And it is possible that they have yet another kindred connection with mankind.

When similar combined characteristics occur in humans — impulsiveness, excessive activity or restlessness, difficulty focusing or concentrating, trouble multi-tasking, difficulty coping with stress and a low frustration tolerance among other symptoms — a diagnosis of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a possible conclusion.

It is in this vein that scientists believe an overlap exists between hyperactive pooches and their human counterparts.

Identifying ADHD as a prevalent neuropsychiatric disorder within the human population, a team of veterinary scientists from the University of Helsinki sought to find metabolic markers in dogs with ADHD-like behaviors, and according to their recently published research, they found them.

Acknowledging that metabolic markers associated with ADHD have been documented in similar research on humans, the team selected a test group of 22 privately owned German shepherds carefully screened for ADHD-like behaviors.

The dogs were fed the same food for two weeks prior to the testing to eliminate dietary differences from influencing the results. At the end of the two-week period, researchers drew blood samples and created metabolic profiles of each animal, and then analyzed the results.

What the profiles revealed was the dog’s metabolites showed alterations in tryptophan and phospholipids, metabolic traits that have also been found in humans exhibiting the ADHD-like behaviors of inattention, impulsiveness and hyperactivity.

Since tryptophan and phospholipids are associated with the processing of food and the dogs had all been on the same diet, the alterations of those metabolic markers, they concluded, indicate that there is a difference in the intestinal microbiota of dogs with ADHD-like behaviors.

As gut microbia has been tied to things such as mood disorders and autism, and research has shown that lowered levels of the specific metabolites they discovered in the dog’s can lead to changes in the central nervous system. This combination of factors, they noted, may predispose dogs to neurological and behavioral abnormalities.

Humans and their dogs share many things — including lifestyles, homes, resources and affections and as science continually discovers, health conditions — but maybe, if we keep working at it, someday we’ll also share solutions.

Sharna Johnson is a writer who is always searching for ponies. You can reach her at:

[email protected]