Folic Acid Supplementation in a Guide Dog Breeding Colony

Congenital malformations, commonly known as birth defects, can be caused by both genetic and environmental factors, or a combination of the two. The risk of certain birth defects can increase when nutrients are lacking during pregnancy. This is true for both humans and animals!

Folic acid, a type of B vitamin, is essential for making new, healthy cells. While everyone needs folic acid, it is especially important for pregnant women to take prenatal vitamins that contain folic acid to help prevent specific birth defects. Research has shown that a lack of folic acid can lead to issues such as cleft palate, neural tube defects, and heart defects.

A small number of studies have explored the impact of folic acid supplementation in dogs, with similar results. In some breeds who are at high risk of oral clefts and caesarean section, supplementing broods with folic acid during their pregnancy is thought to reduce the risk of puppies being born with cleft palates (down from 8.6-17.6% to around 4.5% across four studies) and caesarean sections (from over 25% to around 12% in a small study on Chihuahua and Pug dogs). While our broods already eat a pregnancy diet containing folic acid and produce lower rates of cleft palate than has been reported in other breeds even after supplementation (around 2.2%), we were interested to know whether additional supplementation of folic acid would further reduce or eliminate the occurrence of cleft palates or other complications.

Our study included 137 pregnant dogs that received folic acid daily from the start of their heat cycle until the 40th day of pregnancy. We compared them with 134 dogs from the previous year who did not receive the supplement. In total, 1,917 puppies were born during the study: 1,027 from the folic acid group and 890 from the control group.

So what did we find? The results showed no statistically significant differences between the two groups in the rates of cleft palate, umbilical hernias, stillbirths, or caesarean sections. Folic acid supplementation did not reduce the rates of these birth defects and complications in our population of Labrador Retrievers, Golden Retrievers, and Lab/Golden crosses. Given the overall excellent health and quality diets of Guide Dogs for the Blind’s breeding dogs, it is not surprising that additional folic acid supplementation did not yield observable positive impacts.

The findings described above have since been published in the Journal of Small Animal Practice. If you would like a copy of the peer-reviewed publication, please email us at [email protected].