It is a serious heart condition whereby the heart muscle is enlarged and thin walled. Your Boxer will experience shortness of breath, coughing and can’t take to exercise.

Another serious heart condition is called cardiac conduction disease that is affecting Boxer’s longevity. It was previously known as Boxer cardiomyopathy but the new term is used to differentiate it from dilative cardiomyopathy.

Cardiac conduction is difficult to deal with due to 3 factors.

-One is many Boxers will not show any symptom (asymptotic) but will just drop dead suddenly from it.

-The Boxers develop this disease later in life, often after they have been bred.

-There was no good screening method for it until the one recently developed by Ohio State University researchers, called the 24-hour Holter monitor test.

However, there is still no assurance that Boxers “cleared” now from cardiac conduction disease by the Holter test will remain so in the future.

Many breeders and Boxer experts are now working to refine the test procedures, expand the database and come up with a guideline to select only, for breeding purposes, those Boxers with high probability of being free of the disease.

There are also concerns elimination of too many dogs from the gene pool would be bad for the breed diversity and could cause more problems in the future. Some opinions hold that extensive culling should only get done after more studies on genetic diversity in Boxers.   

Hip dysplasia

This is a bone disorder whereby there is an improper fit of the large femur bone with the hip socket, causing lots of pain and lameness.