Condition guide
When Does IVDD Start in Dachshunds? Years Before the First Episode
The disc disease starts before a dachshund's first birthday, calcifications peak at about two, and the first episode arrives at five or six. The studies that measured it, by age, in one table.
Your dachshund's disc disease did not start on the day he cried out on the stairs. It started before his first birthday, when the gel inside his discs began turning to cartilage the way it does in most discs of a chondrodystrophic dog by one year. The calcifications that an X-ray can see appear between six and eighteen months and reach their peak number at about two years. The first episode, the one that gets a date in his file, arrives at five or six on average and almost never before two. The years in between are the only part of this timeline an owner can do anything with, and they are the years nobody mentions.
Affiliate disclosure: Dog Orthopedic is reader-supported. When you buy through links on our site we earn a commission at no extra cost to you — about 3% on most pet products, and the same rate on every product we compare, so no pick earns us more than another. Prescription medication earns us nothing, and seeing your vet earns us nothing; we recommend both anyway. Learn more.
Imagery: Lifestyle photographs on this site are licensed from Pexels (royalty-free) and credited per image. Pexels imagery illustrates conditions and contexts — it does not depict the specific dogs or test sessions described in the text. Product photographs come from Amazon's Creators API. Breed portraits are illustrations of typical breed type rather than photographs of individual dogs, and are not drawn to scale against one another.
Why "when does it start" has three answers#
Owners ask this question with one event in mind, the first bad day, and the literature answers it with three different events. They sit years apart, and the confusion between them is why a five-year-old's disc episode gets called sudden.
| What "starts" | Age | What the evidence is |
|---|---|---|
| The disc tissue degenerates | Birth to 12 months | Degenerative changes detectable in newborn chondrodystrophic dogs; by one year most discs show cartilage-like change (Hansen's pathology series, as reported by Rohdin 2010) |
| Calcifications become visible on X-ray | 6 to 18 months, peaking at 24 to 27 months | 40 dachshunds radiographed repeatedly from 6 or 12 months to 2 years (Jensen and Arnbjerg 2001); 20.4% of 274 clinically normal 12-to-18-month-olds already had a calcified disc (Stigen and Christensen 1993) |
| The first clinical episode | Mean 5.42 years; median 66.5 to 74 months | 310 cases in a 2,031-dog survey (Packer 2016); 154 referral cases (Thatcher 2024); 100 surgeries in 95 dogs (Rohdin 2010) |
| The age band where the largest share of dogs has been affected | 8 to 10 years | 41.9% of survey dogs in that band had been diagnosed, against 0.2% under two (Packer 2016) |
Read down that table once and the shape of the problem changes. The disease is a puppy's disease that presents in a middle-aged dog. The dog who "suddenly" goes down at six has carried it for five years.
When the disc itself starts to change: before his first birthday#
Dachshunds are chondrodystrophic, and the word covers the discs as well as the legs. The same genetics that shortens the long bones changes the shock-absorbing centre of each disc from a gel into a stiff, cartilage-like material, which then tends to calcify. Our breed guide to dachshund IVDD explains the mechanism and the retrogene behind it; this piece is only about the clock.
The clock starts early. Reviewing the pathology, the authors of a Finnish surgical series summarised the classic post-mortem work this way: degenerative changes can be detected already in the newborn chondrodystrophic dog, and at one year of age most discs show the cartilage-like change.[1] Calcification visible to the naked eye has been described as early as nine months.[2]
None of this is visible from the outside. A one-year-old dachshund with degenerating discs jumps, runs and lands exactly like one without. That is not the dog hiding anything. There is, at this stage, nothing to hide; the tissue has changed and nothing has yet gone wrong with it.
When the calcifications become visible: six months to two years#
This is the only stage with a prospective study behind it, and it is worth reading closely because it fixes the screening window.
Jensen and Arnbjerg radiographed 40 dachshunds at regular intervals from six or twelve months of age to two years, with twelve of them followed again at three to four. New calcifications appeared at high rates between six and eighteen months. The number of affected dogs and the number of calcified discs reached a plateau or a maximum at about 24 to 27 months. After two years, previously calcified discs began to dissolve without any clinical sign, so the count of visible calcifications went down again.[3]
How common is it to have a calcified disc at that age with no symptoms whatever? In Norway, 274 clinically normal dachshunds aged 12 to 18 months were radiographed for a heritability study. One in five, 20.4%, already had at least one calcified disc.[4] What that figure establishes is narrow and useful: the process is visible on a film, in a fifth of outwardly normal dogs, four or five years before anyone would have a reason to look.
One caution the X-ray owes you. Plain films undercount. When 20 dachshund spines were radiographed and then sectioned, radiography found 148 calcified discs and histology found 230; the sensitivity of the film against the tissue was 0.6.[6] A dog with two calcifications on film probably has three or four in the tissue. A dog with none on film may still have a slight one.
When the first episode happens: five or six, almost never before two#
Now the number owners are actually asking for, and it is remarkably consistent across three very different kinds of study.
| Cohort | Design | Age at first episode |
|---|---|---|
| DachsLife 2015, 310 veterinary-diagnosed cases among 2,031 UK dachshunds | Owner survey | Mean 5.42 years (SD 2.40) |
| 154 dachshunds with confirmed thoracolumbar extrusion at three UK neurology services | Referral case series | Median 66.5 months (about 5.5 years) |
| 100 surgeries in 95 dachshunds, Finland | Surgical series | Median 74 months (about 6.2 years), range 31 to 158 months |
| 28 owners in a Finnish screening cohort recalling the age of first signs | Questionnaire, owner recollection | Median 72 months, range 30 to 132 |
Sources for the table, in order: the DachsLife survey,[7] the British referral series,[8] the Finnish surgical series,[1] and the Finnish owner recollections, which the authors themselves flag as older than earlier reports and possibly inaccurate.[2]
The survey's age bands say something the averages cannot. Of 498 dogs under two years old, one was a diagnosed case. In the two-to-four band it was 18 of 461, or 3.9%. Four to six, 13.6%. Six to eight, 33.0%. Eight to ten, 41.9%.[7] Those proportions are cumulative, since they count any dog that has ever had an episode, so they rise with age even after new episodes slow down. But the shape at the young end is unambiguous: the episode is a rarity before two and a commonplace after six. Swedish insurance data across 665,249 dogs agrees that incidence rises with age, and puts miniature dachshunds at the top of the incidence table, at 237 first claims per 10,000 dog-years against 142 for standards.[9]
So the honest sentence is this. The disease starts before his first birthday. The symptom starts at five or six. What gets written in his file is the second date, and it is called the beginning.
“Because your dog can't tell you how much pain he or she is in.”
What the sign actually looks like#
Because the first episode is a middle-aged event, it arrives in a dog whose owner has spent four or five years learning that he is fine. That is the setting in which a new sign is easiest to explain away.
In the Finnish cohort, where every dog was over ten and every diagnosis had been confirmed by a vet, owners were asked what they had noticed. Back or neck pain in 88% of affected dogs. A reluctance to jump onto the sofa in 81%. And the two were tied to each other: dogs whose owners reported more frequent back pain were also the dogs reported as more often unwilling to jump.[2] The authors add something we think every dachshund owner should hear once: dogs with many calcifications had signs more often than dogs with few, and, in their words, might have clinical signs more often than the owners recognise.
A dachshund who used to launch himself at the cushion and now stands at the foot of the sofa looking at it is not being lazy at five. Back or neck pain was the sign owners reported most; the sofa refusal was second, in four of five affected dogs at some point in their lives, and the two travelled together. He is a common presentation, not a mood. Our guide to telling whether a dog is in pain covers the general signs; for a dachshund, the sofa is the specific one.
The window in between: what a screening X-ray at two to four can and cannot tell you#
If the disease is present at one and symptomatic at six, the useful question is whether anything in between can be measured. In the Nordic countries the answer has been yes for two decades, and the two cohorts below are the evidence.
The Finnish, Danish and Norwegian breed clubs screen dachshunds with a spinal radiograph in a window that opens at 24 months and closes at 42 months in Finland and 48 in Denmark and Norway, and score the number of calcified discs: grade 0 for none, grade 1 for one or two, grade 2 for three or four, grade 3 for five or more.[2] The window is the one Jensen and Arnbjerg's curve dictates: after the count has peaked, before dissolution has hidden it.
What that number predicts, in the two cohorts that waited long enough to find out:
| Cohort | Follow-up | Finding |
|---|---|---|
| 193 Finnish dachshunds screened, then surveyed at 10+ years | Lifetime | 31% developed disc disease overall. Grade 0: 4 of 44 dogs (9%). Grade 3: 26 of 39 dogs (64%). Odds ratio for grade 3 against grade 0: 17.9 |
| 117 Danish dachshunds radiographed at 24 to 48 months in 2004 to 2006, followed to 9+ years or death | Lifetime | Five or more calcifications carried a relative risk of 14.78 for later herniation; as a test, sensitivity 0.79, specificity 0.91. (The same paper's separate 503-dog incidence study put lifetime herniation at 18%) |
Sources: the Finnish cohort[2] and the Danish cohort.[5]
Those are large differences. A grade 3 dog at three years old had roughly a two-in-three chance of a clinical episode in that cohort; a grade 0 dog about one in eleven. Outside the Nordic countries the film is not routinely offered, so if your dachshund is between two and four, it is a thing to ask for rather than wait to be offered.
Two limits, stated plainly. First, the film is not a pass. In the Finnish cohort, 9% of grade 0 dogs still developed disease, and a Finnish surgical series found that extrusions requiring surgery occur in dogs with no visible calcification anywhere on their films.[1] Second, the film is not the DNA test, and the DNA test does not replace it. In Danish long-haired and smooth-haired dachshunds the FGF4 retrogene insertion was almost fixed, present in nearly every dog, so it could not separate the dogs who would herniate from those who would not; the authors concluded the insertion "is not a valid risk indicator on its own" and that calcification status remains the more reliable scheme.[5] If a breeder shows you a gene result and no film, you have been shown the less informative of the two documents.
What we do not know#
The screening evidence is Nordic. The Finnish and Danish cohorts are club-registered dogs radiographed under national schemes, and we could not find an equivalent prospective cohort from North America. The biology is not going to differ, but the base rates might, and the scoring depends on a reader trained in the scheme.
The age-of-onset figures come from three different kinds of study and they agree within a year of each other, which is reassuring. But the survey figure is owner-reported diagnosis, the referral figure is dogs sick enough to reach a neurologist, and the surgical figure is dogs sick enough to be operated on. None of them is the age at which a dachshund first has a mild, self-limiting episode that nobody takes to a vet. That number probably sits lower than any of the three, and nobody has measured it.
And the thing owners most want, an intervention in the two-to-five window that has been shown to postpone the first episode, does not exist in the literature we read. The DachsLife survey found that dogs not allowed to jump on and off furniture had higher odds of disc disease; the authors' own reading is that owners restrict dogs after a diagnosis rather than before one, and it is a warning about reading surveys backwards, not evidence that jumping is safe.[7] The same survey found more exercise associated with lower odds. That is the closest thing to a modifiable factor in the data, and it is an association in a survey, not a trial.
What to do this week, by the age of your dog#
Under two. Nothing is wrong and there is nothing to buy for this. Weigh him and write it down; the survey data associates activity with lower odds, and a lean, active young dachshund is the only version of prevention with any signal behind it. Read the emergency signs at the top once, so that if they ever come you do not spend an hour deciding.
Two to four. This is the window, and it closes. Ask your vet, this week, whether they can take and score a screening spinal radiograph for disc calcification, or refer you to someone who can. Ask what it costs before you book; it is a sedated film of the whole spine, and prices vary too much for us to print one honestly. If you are choosing a puppy rather than owning one, ask the breeder for the parents' calcification scores, not the gene test.
Five and older. He is now at the age the whole literature points to. The sign to watch is the sofa, the car seat, the bed: the jump he used to make and now considers. That is not something to file under age. In the Finnish cohort, four of five dogs who turned out to have the disease had shown that sign at some point; nobody has measured how often it is the first one, and we are not claiming it is. A dog who has started refusing the jump needs a vet visit, and needs it before the day the refusal becomes something worse.
For that last group, and for any owner who would rather delete the jump than watch for it, the one category of purchase that follows honestly from this evidence is something that replaces the jump onto the piece of furniture he uses most. A ramp is the gentler option where there is floor for it; to a sofa it needs about five feet of run-out, which is why most living rooms end up with steps, and why the card here is the steps. Two things before the card. It is cheaper to lift a nine-kilo dog than to buy anything, and if he tolerates being lifted, that is the answer. And nothing in the literature shows that a ramp or steps postpone a disc episode; what they do is remove a landing that a dog with degenerating discs takes several times a day, and we think that is reason enough, stated at its true size.
#1 Pick
Snoozer
Snoozer Scalloped Dog Stairs / Ramp
Our score
$131.95–$196.95
Best for
Indoor bed and couch access for dogs under 100 lb that won't use a ramp
Stairs work for dogs that won't approach a ramp — usually because the incline frightens them — and foam stairs work better than plastic because the step gives way under the landing instead of stopping the paw dead. Buy these if your dog is under the 100 lb rating and the room cannot spare five feet of ramp run-out. Check the height against your actual bed before you check out, and understand that the warranty covers manufacturing defects rather than the slow foam compression that is how these eventually wear out.
Pros
- Foam steps rather than hollow plastic, so the step deforms under the landing — and the landing is the moment that drives the most force through a senior dog's front shoulders
- Scalloped, dished step surfaces rather than flat treads, which is the feature the maker leads on and the one a nervous dog notices first
- Luxury microsuede cover, fully removable and machine washable cold
- "Non-slip, stable base" in the maker's own words, and a footprint wide enough that the unit does not skate on hardwood
- Handmade in South Carolina, by a company trading under this name since 1985
Cons
- Rated to 100 lb, and that is the number that disqualifies these for a lot of the dogs this site is about. A 110 lb Labrador or any giant-breed senior is outside the rating, and no amount of foam quality changes it
- The one-year warranty explicitly excludes "wearing or materials or components which may occur after extended use." Foam compression over years — the way foam stairs actually fail — is the excluded case, not the covered one
- The listing contradicts itself on the unit's own weight: a feature bullet says "weighing only 4 pounds" while the listing's dimension field says 8 lb. If you are buying partly because you intend to carry it room to room, that is a two-fold difference nobody has resolved
- Amazon and Snoozer also disagree on the footprint's orientation — Amazon lists 21 in wide × 25 in deep, Snoozer's own page lists 25 in wide × 21 in deep. Measure the gap beside your bed for both shapes before ordering
- Bigger footprint than plastic stairs — needs real floor space
- Premium price compared to plastic step alternatives
One thing the card cannot show: the listing it links is the 17.5-inch unit, which is the bed height. For a low sofa the 14-inch unit is the right one, and on our last check it was sold direct by Snoozer at $131.95, so measure the seat before you choose either. Steps that overshoot the cushion turn the last move into a jump. The 100-pound ceiling that disqualifies these for half the dogs on this site is irrelevant to a dachshund. What is relevant is the failure mode: the foam compresses over years, the warranty excludes that, and a top step that gives too far is worse than no step. Press it every few months. Our steps versus ramp guide has the angle arithmetic for the ramp route, and what to do when a dog will not use a ramp covers the dog who refuses either.
The delay this site keeps writing about is usually months. For a dachshund it is structural, and it is years: the disease is present at one, measurable at three, and named at six. The only part of that you can move is the middle.
Sources#
- Rohdin C, Jeserevic J, Viitmaa R, Cizinauskas S. "Prevalence of radiographic detectable intervertebral disc calcifications in Dachshunds surgically treated for disc extrusion." Acta Veterinaria Scandinavica. 2010;52:24. doi:10.1186/1751-0147-52-24 — 100 surgeries in 95 dachshunds; median age 74 months (range 31 to 158); calcifications decline with age; extrusion occurs in dogs with no visible calcification.
- Lappalainen AK, Vaittinen E, Junnila J, Laitinen-Vapaavuori O. "Intervertebral disc disease in Dachshunds radiographically screened for intervertebral disc calcifications." Acta Veterinaria Scandinavica. 2014;56:89. doi:10.1186/s13028-014-0089-4 — 193 dogs followed to at least ten years; 9% of grade 0 and 64% of grade 3 dogs developed disease; OR 17.9; commonest signs back or neck pain (88%) and unwillingness to jump onto a sofa (81%); screening window 24 to 48 months.
- Jensen VF, Arnbjerg J. "Development of intervertebral disk calcification in the dachshund: a prospective longitudinal radiographic study." Journal of the American Animal Hospital Association. 2001;37(3):274-282. doi:10.5326/15473317-37-3-274 — 40 dachshunds radiographed from 6 or 12 months to 2 years; calcifications appear at 6 to 18 months, peak at 24 to 27 months, then dissolve.
- Stigen O, Christensen K. "Calcification of intervertebral discs in the dachshund: an estimation of heritability." Acta Veterinaria Scandinavica. 1993;34(4):357-361. doi:10.1186/bf03548178 — 20.4% of 274 clinically normal 12-to-18-month-old dachshunds had a calcified disc; heritability 0.22.
- Bruun CS, Bruun C, Marx T, Proschowsky HF, Fredholm M. "Breeding schemes for intervertebral disc disease in dachshunds: Is disc calcification score preferable to genotyping of the FGF4 retrogene insertion on CFA12?" Canine Medicine and Genetics. 2020;7:18. doi:10.1186/s40575-020-00096-6 — two studies in one paper: an incidence study of 503 Danish dachshunds aged nine or more (18% herniation), and a follow-up of 117 dogs radiographed at 24 to 48 months in 2004 to 2006 (five or more calcifications: RR 14.78, sensitivity 0.79, specificity 0.91); FGF4 insertion almost fixed in long- and smooth-haired dogs.
- Stigen Ø, Kolbjørnsen Ø. "Calcification of intervertebral discs in the dachshund: a radiographic and histopathologic study of 20 dogs." Acta Veterinaria Scandinavica. 2007;49:39. doi:10.1186/1751-0147-49-39 — radiography sensitivity 0.6 against histology; 148 calcified discs on film versus 230 in tissue.
- Packer RMA, Seath IJ, O'Neill DG, De Decker S, Volk HA. "DachsLife 2015: an investigation of lifestyle associations with the risk of intervertebral disc disease in Dachshunds." Canine Genetics and Epidemiology. 2016;3:8. doi:10.1186/s40575-016-0039-8 — 2,031 dachshunds, 310 cases; mean age at diagnosis 5.42 ± 2.40 years; case proportions by age band from 0.2% under two to 41.9% at eight to ten.
- Thatcher H, Targett M, Alcoverro E, Stee K, Schofield I, Lowrie M, Gomes SA. "Incidence and clinical characterisation of thoracolumbar intervertebral disc extrusions in Basset Hounds compared with Dachshunds." Veterinary Record. 2024;194(1):e3212. doi:10.1002/vetr.3212 — 154 dachshunds with confirmed thoracolumbar extrusion; median age at presentation 66.5 months.
- Bergknut N, Egenvall A, Hagman R, Gustås P, Hazewinkel HA, Meij BP, Lagerstedt AS. "Incidence of intervertebral disk degeneration-related diseases and associated mortality rates in dogs." Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association. 2012;240(11):1300-1309. doi:10.2460/javma.240.11.1300 — Swedish insurance data on 665,249 dogs; miniature dachshund 237.1 and standard dachshund 141.5 first claims per 10,000 dog-years; incidence increased with age.
Frequently asked
- At what age does IVDD start in dachshunds?
- It depends what you mean by start, and the three honest answers are years apart. The disc tissue itself begins to change in the first year of life: chondrodystrophic dogs show degenerative disc changes from birth, and by one year most discs have undergone the cartilage-like change that sets up the disease. Calcifications become visible on X-ray between six and eighteen months and reach their maximum number at about 24 to 27 months. The first clinical episode, the one an owner sees, comes much later: mean age at diagnosis was 5.42 years in a survey of 2,031 dachshunds, median 66.5 months in 154 referral cases, and median 74 months in 95 dogs who went to surgery. So the disease starts before the first birthday and the symptom starts at five or six.
- Can a one-year-old dachshund get IVDD?
- A clinical episode before two is rare but not impossible. In the DachsLife 2015 survey, one dog in the 498 aged under two was a diagnosed case, against 13.6% of dogs aged four to six and 41.9% of dogs aged eight to ten. The youngest dog in a 95-dog surgical series was 31 months. What a one-year-old very commonly has is the disease without the episode: in a Norwegian study of 274 clinically normal dachshunds aged 12 to 18 months, 20.4% already had at least one calcified disc on X-ray, and a prospective study found new calcifications appearing fastest between six and eighteen months of age.
- When is the peak age for a dachshund disc episode?
- Around five to seven years, in every dataset we could find. Mean age at diagnosis in the DachsLife survey was 5.42 years with a standard deviation of 2.40. In a Finnish surgical series the 5-to-7-year group held 53 of 100 operations, against 27 in dogs of four and under and 20 in dogs of eight and over. Referral cases in a British neurology series had a median age of 66.5 months. By proportion of dogs affected, the survey figure keeps climbing to the 8-to-10-year band, at 41.9%, because it counts every dog that has ever had an episode, not just new ones.
- What age should a dachshund have the IVDD screening X-ray?
- Between 24 and 48 months (the Finnish scheme prefers 24 to 42), and the reasoning is biological rather than administrative. Calcifications appear between six and eighteen months, peak in number at about 24 to 27 months, and then start to dissolve, so a film taken at 18 months undercounts and a film taken at six years undercounts more. The Danish and Norwegian schemes screen at 24 to 48 months and the Finnish scheme at 24 to 42. A dog with five or more calcifications on that film had 17.9 times the odds of later disc disease compared with a dog with none in a Finnish cohort followed to at least ten years, and in a Danish follow-up of 117 dogs screened at that age the same cut-off predicted later herniation with a sensitivity of 0.79 and a specificity of 0.91. Ask your vet for the price; it is a sedated spinal radiograph, and the film needs reading by someone who knows the scoring scheme.
- Does a clear screening X-ray mean my dachshund will not get IVDD?
- No, and we would rather say so than let the number imply it. In the Finnish cohort, 4 of 44 dogs with no calcifications at screening still developed disc disease, and a Finnish surgical series found that extrusions requiring surgery occur in dogs with no visible calcifications at all. Plain radiography also misses roughly 40% of calcified discs when checked against histology. What a clear film buys you is a much lower risk and a starting point, not immunity. The emergency signs still apply to every dachshund at every age.