Puppies from 2 months to 8 months can experience symptoms of HOD. This range is the range of highest growth rate in Great Dane puppies. Puppies with the most severe symptoms suffer from anorexia, weight loss, fever, and depression accompanied by extremely swollen, warm, and painful long-bone abnormalities. The pain can be so severe that they refuse to bear weight on the affected limbs. The symptoms can appear for approximately 1 week and then disappear reoccurring multiple times of a 6 week period.

Like Pano, HOD can be avoided by careful proper nutrition during the rapid growth phases. There is quite a lot of information available on Giant Breed puppy nutrition. In summary there are two schools of thought either a low fat, low protein food or a low calcium, low phosphorus food. You can choose to follow one of the two schools of thought and feed recommended foods or you can actually find foods that are low fat, low protein, low calcium, low phosphorus. Great Danes will grow large, don’t try to encourage their rate of growth or feed them to grow as large as possible. Pano is actually the lesser of a couple of orthopedic growth related diseases.

Again like Pano, HOD usually doesn’t cause permanent damage, but it can.