Two things set this page apart. Our growth model is less reliable here than anywhere else on the site, because this is the biggest breed we cover. And bloat ends Great Dane lives, sometimes within hours of the first odd behaviour. So that section comes early, and starts with what to do rather than a statistic.
Where our own numbers run out
The breed standard is unusual: it sets a height and no weight at all, asking that a male “shall not be less than 30 inches at the shoulders” and a female not less than 28. So the weights in the panel came off real dogs.
Now hold them against the research our calculator rests on. The largest published growth standards do not hedge their own limit: the charts “do not apply dogs with an adult weight >40 kg” — 88 lb. The authors tried to fit the biggest dogs and stopped. Those breeds, they wrote, “had widely varying growth trajectories and, consequently, it was not possible to create a growth curve model.”
The midpoint of the panel’s male range sits around 143 lb, the female midpoint around 124 lb. Both are far past 88 lb, the male by more than half again. That is why the caution above names both sexes. On most giant-breed pages the exclusion catches the males and lets the females through. Here it takes everything.
Our methodology page calls giant breeds the model’s weakest case and says no independent cross-check exists at either end of the size scale. We are not softening that here. Read the milestone table below for shape rather than as a target. Height also finishes before weight: see when do puppies stop growing.
Bloat, and the hour that decides the outcome
Gastric dilatation-volvulus is the stomach swelling with gas and then rotating on itself. The twist seals both ends. The stomach presses on the vein returning blood to the heart, and the dog goes into shock while the stomach wall dies.
What it looks like, and what to do
If your dog is doing any of the following, phone an open veterinary hospital now and say you think it is bloating. Ring while someone else gets the car.
The American College of Veterinary Surgeons lists the early signs as “an anxious look or looking at the abdomen, standing and stretching, drooling, distending abdomen, or retching without producing anything”. Later, dogs “pant, have abdominal distension (bloated belly), or be weak and collapse and be recumbent.”
| Stage | What you may see |
|---|---|
| Early | Retching that brings nothing up. Drooling. An anxious look. Looking at the belly. Standing and stretching over and over. A belly that is starting to swell. |
| Later | A drum-tight belly. Panting. Weakness. Collapse. |
Read the belly carefully, because it sits on both rows. The surgeons put a distending abdomen among the first signs and a distended one among the late ones. So a belly that still looks normal is not reassurance, and a belly you can watch changing is not something you have time to sit on. The early row is what saves dogs. A summary of the Purdue research written for breeders says that without treatment “within one to two hours” the condition becomes life-threatening. About a quarter of episodes are swelling alone; three quarters involve the twist. The surgeons’ body puts mortality “at approximately 15%” even with treatment, rising when signs have lasted over six hours.
Do not try to relieve it yourself. Do not give anything by mouth. Drive.
How likely it actually is
The best figures come from a prospective cohort, a group followed forward rather than looked back on. Researchers recruited 1,914 dogs across eleven large and giant breeds at dog shows and followed them. Incidence “for the 7 large and 4 giant breeds was 23 and 26 cases/1,000 dog-years at risk”, a cumulative 5.7% across all breeds. Of the affected dogs, 28.6% died.
The breed-by-breed figure sits in a later review, which reports that “the Great Dane had the highest incidence at 53 cases of GDV per 1000 dog years”, roughly double the giant-breed average above.
Turning a rate into a lifetime figure needs a model. A decision analysis combined breed lifespan with breed incidence for five breeds. Lifetime risk “ranged from 3.9% (0–11.2%) for Rottweiler to 36.7% (25.2–44.6%) for Great Dane”. The breeder summary goes higher, calling this “the breed with the highest average lifetime likelihood of a bloat episode … at 42.4%.”
Both are estimates rather than head counts, and they disagree, so we print both. Between a third and a half is the honest reading, and no breed came out higher.
The risk factors that hold up
A second study followed 1,637 dogs aged six months or over across the same eleven breeds, and found a 6% cumulative incidence in large and giant breeds together. Four things raised risk: “increasing age”, “having a first-degree relative with a history of GDV”, “having a faster speed of eating”, and “having a raised feeding bowl”.
The breeder summary sizes several. For giant breeds risk climbs about 20% for each year after age three. A first-degree relative (parent, full sibling or offspring) that has bloated goes with a 63% greater risk. Fast eating adds about 15%.
Chest shape gets less airtime and is measurable: the deeper and narrower the chest relative to its width, the higher the risk. Lean dogs were also at higher risk than fat ones, which inverts most health advice.
Temperament shows up too. In the prospective study, “the only breed-specific characteristic significantly associated with a decreased incidence of GDV was an owner-perceived personality trait of happiness.” Fearful and nervous dogs bloated more often. That is an owner rating a dog, not a diagnosis.
Two rules everybody repeats that the data contradicts
Raised bowls. The non-dietary study found that “approximately 20 and 52% of cases of GDV among the large breed and giant breed dogs, respectively, were attributed to having a raised feed bowl.” Both halves matter: a fifth of large-breed cases, over half of giant-breed ones. The breeder summary puts the increase at 110%. Raising the bowl is sold as prevention and was measured doing the reverse.
Exercise after meals. Our two sources disagree, so we show you that rather than pick a side. The 2003 summary says exercise timing around meals showed no correlation, noting that most affected dogs bloated at night on an empty, gas-filled stomach. The 2014 review by the same author says “moderate daily and postprandial activity appeared to be beneficial to dogs prone to GDV”, postprandial meaning after eating. Neither supports the strict rest-after-meals rule owners are handed.
Gastropexy: what tacking buys
A gastropexy stitches the stomach to the body wall so it cannot rotate, often at the same time as a neuter or spay. Be precise about what it prevents. The surgeons’ body says it will “prevent the life-threatening gastric volvulus from occurring”, but “will not prevent the stomach from expanding”. A tacked dog can still bloat. It should not twist, and the twist is what kills.
The decision model sizes that benefit. Across five breeds the cut in mortality against no gastropexy ran “from 2.2-fold (Rottweiler) to 29.6-fold (Great Dane)”, the largest gain of any breed examined, and cost-effective once lifetime risk reached about 34%. The authors add that the operation “raises ethical issues that need to be considered by veterinarians and dog breeders”.
What they are actually like
Start with the ceiling on every sentence written about breed character. A 2022 study paired 18,385 owner surveys with DNA from 2,155 dogs and found breed accounted for about 9% of the difference in behaviour between one dog and the next.
Inside that limit, the breed has a row in the classic aggression survey. Duffy and colleagues scored 3,791 dogs across 33 breeds, counting those that hit the top of the scale (snapping, biting or trying to bite) on at least one question per category.
| Directed at | Great Danes | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Unfamiliar people | 3 of 53 | 5.7% |
| Their own household | 1 of 53 | 1.9% |
| Other dogs | 5 of 53 | 9.4% |
| Another dog in the home | 2 of 41 | 4.9% |
The last row has a smaller denominator, because only dogs sharing a home with another dog could be scored. And 53 dogs is thin. One more moves the stranger figure by two points. For scale, the Akita reached 29.3% of 99 toward other dogs and the Doberman 5.6% of 144 toward strangers. This breed reads as middling. It was not in the study’s separate 11-breed breed-club sample; we checked both lists.
The first two years
One British project ran two separate groups, and they get welded together constantly. Two hundred and eighty-five young guide dogs were rated for trainability at 5, 8 and 12 months. Their own carers reported a drop between 5 and 8 months; the trainers who knew them less well reported a rise. A different group of 93, goldens and Labradors only, took a hands-on sit test at 5 and 8 months, with no 12-month visit.
The finding everyone quotes belongs to the 93. At 8 months the odds of a dog ignoring “sit” from its own carer rose, at an odds ratio of 2.14 (1.46–3.11). From a stranger giving the same command, obedience improved, at 0.40 (0.25–0.63). The dog is becoming selective, and you are the target.
Owner reports follow a similar clock. A UK cohort followed to eighteen months peaked at the twelve-month survey, where 513 of 1,219 owners (42.1%) had at least one unwanted behaviour to report.
No Great Dane appears in either project, so take the timing and not the detail. The timing is awkward here: the months when this dog stops listening are the months when it weighs as much as you do and its skeleton is unfinished.
Growth is the lever you actually hold
Growth management matters more in this breed than any other on the site, because there is more skeleton being built, faster, under more weight.
Calcium during growth has a ceiling rather than a target, which is the real reason large-breed puppy food exists. The labelling is taken apart in large-breed puppy food and calcium. And the story that fast growth causes cartilage disease does not survive the pathology literature; what the controlled trials measured was overfeeding. See rapid growth and joint problems.
Size still tracks that disease even if growth rate does not explain it. In an insured Swedish population of over 600,000 dogs, osteochondrosis of the limbs appeared at 3.77 cases per 10,000 dog-years at risk. The shoulder was the most affected joint, and every breed at raised risk was large or giant. For the stifle, the knee, the authors name “the Mastiff, Irish Wolfhound, and Great Dane” among the highest risk.
Across their life
This is a list for the consulting room, not a diagnostic tool.
The screening numbers, and how to read them
Every percentage below describes films and panels that owners chose to send to OFA’s voluntary registry.
| Screen | Evaluations | Graded abnormal | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hips | 19,240 | 12.5% | 104th of 219 breeds |
| Elbows | 5,884 | 5.0% | 84th |
| Shoulder (OCD) | 232 | 5.6% | 4th |
| Eyes | 7,135 | 5.3% | 92nd |
| Thyroid | 9,079 | 4.9%, plus 14.3% equivocal | 39th |
| Congenital cardiac | 6,350 | 0.5%, plus 0.7% equivocal | 39th |
| Advanced cardiac | 4,510 | 3.1%, plus 2.9% equivocal | 73rd |
The hip figure is unremarkable for a dog this size, in the better half of 219 ranked breeds. The shoulder row deserves a second look: fourth place is real, but on 232 tests it partly tells you which dogs get shoulders X-rayed.
Every number here is pulled toward good news by a known amount. Researchers X-rayed a full set of dogs and watched which films reached the registry: normal hips were 8.2 times as likely to be submitted, with only 49 of 93 sent at all. So treat 12.5% as a floor of unknown depth. And a dog graded dysplastic on film may never limp.
The thyroid result that needs explaining
Abnormal is 4.9%. Equivocal is 14.3%, three times as many.
Equivocal is not a mild abnormal. OFA defines it as results “that are questionable, therefore not definitive”, and asks that “the test be repeated in three to six months”. The panel combines free T4, thyroid stimulating hormone and an antibody test, and a dog can fall between categories on any one of them.
So about one tested Great Dane in seven got an answer that was not an answer. If a breeder shows you a certificate, ask what it said and when. OFA is blunt about the ceiling on any one result. “A negative at any one time will not guarantee that the dog will not develop thyroiditis.” We found no UK primary-care figure for hypothyroidism in this breed, so there is nothing to set beside this.
The heart
Dilated cardiomyopathy, the heart muscle thinning and the chambers stretching, is claimed for this breed constantly. The evidence is thinner than the claim.
A 2024 review’s prevalence table puts the Great Dane at 35.6%, citing a 2012 UK screening study. We could not open that study, so we cannot give its denominator or say what counted as affected. The same review calls the breed’s inheritance “suspected multigenic” and names it among breeds that “may also have malignant ventricular arrhythmias, which may precede development of echocardiographic abnormalities”.
Pulling the other way, a welfare review of the disease here says flatly that “we are unaware of data on its prevalence”. It reports males affected more often than females, a third-highest death rate from heart disease among breeds in a Swedish insurance survey, and survival averaging about five weeks once heart failure began.
Against that, OFA’s advanced cardiac results grade 3.1% of 4,510 Great Danes abnormal. Not a contradiction: that exam is an echocardiogram by a board-certified cardiologist, mostly on young breeding candidates, and its adult-onset clearance lasts a year. A clear scan at two says little about eight. The Doberman page sets out what screening involves.
Wobbler syndrome
The proper name is cervical spondylomyelopathy: the neck vertebrae crowd the spinal cord, and the dog develops a wobbly, drunken gait behind.
We went looking for a prevalence figure and there is not one. The standard review says so directly: “although no prevalence study has been performed, it is likely that CSM is the most common disease of the cervical spine of large and giant breed dogs.”
It does give a pattern. Giant breeds get the bony form (“osseous-associated CSM is seen predominantly in young adult giant breed dogs”) and get it young. Their mean age is 3.8 years, and “the disease may be seen in dogs just a few months old”. That inverts the middle-aged picture seen in Dobermans. The review records Great Danes as having “appeared as the most commonly affected breed” in the 1970s literature. Watch for scuffed hind nails and a wide, unsteady stance behind.
Bone cancer
Size is the dominant risk factor for osteosarcoma, and this breed tops the size scale.
In UK primary-care records covering 905,552 dogs, 331 osteosarcoma cases were confirmed in one year, 0.037% of all dogs. Great Danes came in at 0.87% (95% CI 0.43–1.55), the third highest annual prevalence of any breed, behind the Scottish Deerhound at 3.28% and the Leonberger at 1.48%. After adjustment the odds ratio against crossbreds was 34.24 (95% CI 17.81–65.83), again third. Hold both at once: fewer than one Great Dane in a hundred carried that diagnosis in the year.
A second UK study compared 1,756 osteosarcoma cases against 905,211 dogs without it. It gives the breed an odds ratio of 10.03 (5.81–17.32), and shows what drives it: dogs over 40 kg had osteosarcoma odds of 45.44 (33.74–61.20) against dogs under 10 kg. That figure is the raw one. When the authors put body mass into the full model in place of breed, the same comparison came out at 18.07 (13.87–23.53): smaller, still large. Body mass does most of the work either way. The primary-care study found dogs at or above the mean weight for their own breed had 1.65 times the odds (1.27–2.13) of dogs below it. Aiming for the biggest possible Great Dane is not a health strategy.
Colour: harlequin, merle, and where it gets serious
Harlequin. The mutation sits in a gene called PSMB7 and is autosomal dominant, so one copy is enough to show. Two copies are not survivable: such dogs “are expected to terminate in utero”, so mating two harlequins is expected to lose a quarter of the litter before birth. Harlequin only patterns a dog that also carries merle.
OFA’s export holds just 65 Great Danes tested for it, of which 56.9% came back carrier, first among ranked breeds. Sixty-five is very small, and these owners had a breeding reason to test, so read it as “common in the tested slice” rather than as a population frequency.
Merle. Merle is a mobile piece of DNA inserted into the PMEL17 gene, and its length varies, which is why merle looks so different from dog to dog. Two copies is where the trouble is. The laboratory says double merles “often can have an all white coat accompanied by multiple abnormalities”, that merle dogs “may possess a wide range of auditory and ophthalmologic defects”, and that “breeding two merle dogs is discouraged”.
The hearing part has been measured. Among 153 merle dogs of several breeds, single merles were 2.7% deaf in one ear and 0.9% in both. Double merles were 10% deaf in one ear and 15% in both. Dogs homozygous for merle “were significantly more likely to be deaf than heterozygotes”. Only six of the 153 were Great Danes, so this is a merle finding rather than a breed one.
OFA’s own hearing figures cannot help. Only 11 Great Danes have been BAER tested, and 2 failed. Eighteen per cent sounds alarming and means nothing at that sample size; we give it only to explain why we will not quote it as a rate.
How long they live
In UK primary-care records covering 102,609 dogs and 5,095 confirmed deaths, the Great Dane’s median longevity was 6.0 years, the middle half falling between 4.0 and 9.0 and the full range running 0.0 to 11.0. The paper names it among the shortest-lived breeds it recorded, next to the Dogue de Bordeaux at 5.5. Every breed pooled together in that dataset reached 12.0 years.
The caveat is large: that median rests on 23 deaths, and the same paper’s introduction quotes an earlier estimate of 8.4 years for the breed. Treat 6.0 as the low end of a real range. We wanted better and could not get it. The largest modern UK life-expectancy study covers 584,734 dogs and puts dogs in general at 12.5 years. Its main text names only the ten shortest-lived breeds and the longest-lived, and the Great Dane is in neither. That ten runs from the Caucasian Shepherd Dog at 5.4 years to the French Bulldog at 9.8. The breed’s row sits in a supplementary file that blocks automated readers, so we will not guess at it.
What we could not verify
This breed’s row in the 2024 life-table study. Blocked to our fetcher, so we used the 2013 primary-care figure and flagged its 23-death sample.
The denominators behind two bloat and heart figures. The 35.6% heart prevalence comes from a 2024 review’s table, credited to a 2012 screening study we could not open. The “53 cases per 1,000 dog-years” comes from a review whose underlying breed table we could not read either.
Whether exercise around meals matters. Two reviews by the same author say different things, and neither supports the strict rest rule.
Any prevalence figure for wobbler syndrome. The standard review states that none has been done. That has not changed.
A UK population figure for thyroid disease here. We could not find one, so the registry figures stand unchecked.
Any month-by-month Great Dane puppy weight chart. The tables in circulation cite nothing. Ours is a model output running past its own validation data, in both sexes.
“Great Danes mature at three.” Sourced nowhere we could find. Skeletal maturity and filling out are different events, and only the first has evidence behind it.
How many minutes of exercise a day this breed needs. No study, no standard, no number. Watch the dog. And no research scores any breed on how it does with children.