Hello and welcome to this Small Animal Clinical podcast, brought to you from the Royal Veterinary College in London. My name is Shailen Jassani. Today it's my great pleasure to welcome Richard Meeson. Richard is a diplomats of the European College of Veterinary Surgery and a lecturer in orthopaedics here at the Queen Mother Hospital for Animals. So thanks very much, Richard, for joining me today.

Today, Richard, I'd like to discuss cruciate disease in dogs, which I think is one of the most

common orthopedic disorders in this species.

I guess the kind of most intuitive place to start is by asking me if you could basically remind us essentially what the cruciate ligaments are and what is sort of God's greater purpose for them.

Okay, well thanks for having me here this morning, Shailen.

So the cruciate ligaments, so there's a paired ligament and they cross and that's why they're called a cruciate becauseament. So there's a, they're a paired ligament, and they cross, and that's why they're called a cruciate, because they look like a cross.

And in the knee, there's the cranial ones that inserts at sort of the front of the tibia, and then there's a cordal one.

And it tends to be the cranial cruciate, the one at the front that we tend to see most of the problems with.

And do they, is one more important than the other, as it were?

Yeah.

When there has actually been experimental studies done many, many years ago where they cut one or the other.

And if you cut the one at the front, the cranial cruise shirt, dogs had a lot of lameness, a lot of problems, and they got a lot of arthritis. Whereas if you cut the one at the front, the cranial cruciate, dogs had a lot of lameness and a lot of problems and they got a lot of arthritis.

Whereas if you cut the one at the back, it didn't cause so many problems.

So the cranial one is the considerably more important ligament.

And it sort of functions as a restraining mechanism.

So as a dog walks, its tibia wants to sort of push forwards relative to the femur.

And the cruciate basically acts as sort of a strap to restrain that abnormal movement, which is what we see when they rupture.

And do they essentially do the same thing in humans as well? Because obviously those of us who follow football will be quite familiar with cruci injuries.

So, yeah, the crucia is, the anatomy is quite similar, but people stand upright.

So the leg is sort of straight, whereas dogs stand at an angle.

So there is more of a problem, or the crucia is more important in a dog than in a person,

or there might be some human orthopedic surgeons that might disagree with me.

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