Incessant tail chasing, repetitive shadow stalking, relentless paw chewing for hours and hours every day: Dogs can suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder, too. And a new study helps explain why.
Researchers have zeroed in on four genes that are connected to OCD in dogs. If the same genes turn out to be malfunctioning in the human version of the disorder — and there are clues that they do — this line of research may eventually help scientists develop better drugs for a human disease that is notoriously difficult to treat.
“This is really exciting because psychiatric diseases tend to be very heritable, but finding genes associated with psychiatric diseases in humans has been really difficult,” said Elinor Karlsson, a computational biologist at the Broad Institute at Harvard University.
Read the full, original story: OCD Genes Found In Dogs
