I googled this disease, and all I could find were pages about humans, one page saying it was found in three cats, and one page that mentioned one case in a German Shepard.
I think we might have a case of this disease here at the clinic. A dog came in this morning, very lethargic and unable to walk. One front leg is larger than the other, and both are hard as rocks. I remembered hearing something about it on some primetime news show (20/20 maybe), and went looking for more info, but I’m having a hard time finding much of anything. It doesn’t help that we have dial-up here, and I can only search for a few minutes at a time.
All I really know is that it’s a disease that causes muscle tissue to turn into bone, but I’m trying to find causes, possible treatments (I don’t think there are any), or anything else that might help in making a definite diagnosis.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
I just sent an email to a friend of mine who may be able to help you (she’s the animal health coordinator for a large shelter) - I’ll let you know if she finds anything.
Doc finally got a break from clients toward the end of the day, and had time to take an x-ray. He’s never seen anything like this in 60 years of practice.
One front leg showed up completely white on the film. The other had opaque white splotches all up and down the leg. He said it’s definitely bone growth. His first thought was that it might be bone cancer, but he said the symptoms the dog is showing and what the x-ray showed don’t follow the typical symptoms of bone cancer in dogs.
Before he took the x-ray, we were talking about how the dog’s legs felt hard as rocks, and I told him about the show I saw about fibrodysplasia ossificans, but I couldn’t remember the name of the disease, so I googled it. I wrote the name down for him, and he went back and searched his books for it, and found no mention of it anywhere in the indexes. He hadn’t even heard of it before today. He looked up other bone disorders, but nothing came very close to describing the dog we had in front of us.
I’m still searching for more information for him, but I’m not coming up with much of anything. I found one page that mentioned the disease in one dog, and also said that that dog was the first case of it that had been found.
This is driving me up the wall. The disease is one of those one-in-two-million type things, and that’s in humans. It’s no wonder there’s not much documentation on it.
Bingo!
Turns out ordinary commonfolk can’t research obscure diseases without registering on special sites. I found what I was looking for, at any rate.