Boerboel Health Issues: What's Proven and What's Myth

The short version: what's actually known about Boerboel health

The honest answer to "what are the most common Boerboel health problems" is uncomfortable. Almost nothing about this breed has been measured directly. The Boerboel is uncommon enough to sit out of the large veterinary databases, so most of what circulates online is either borrowed wholesale from other giant breeds or simply invented.

One finding is a real exception. In a study of more than 600,000 insured Swedish dogs, the Boerboel carried the highest relative risk of cranial cruciate ligament rupture of all 181 breeds examined (Engdahl 2021). That, not hip dysplasia, is the breed's single clearest documented health signal. Everything else on the usual list is either a giant-breed risk the Boerboel shares by size, or a claim that falls apart the moment you look for the source.

We sort every claim below into three buckets: what has actually been recorded in Boerboels, what is a real risk for any giant dog, and what has been repeated online without support. The conditions that matter most (hips, elbows, heart, bloat) are screened by X-ray and ultrasound, not by a DNA swab.

The one condition the Boerboel genuinely tops

Cranial cruciate ligament rupture is the knee injury that ends more big-dog athletic careers than anything else, the dog version of a torn ACL. In the Swedish insurance data, the Boerboel's relative risk came in at 11.0 (95% confidence interval 5.84 to 18.8) against the baseline breed, the top of all 181 breeds studied (Engdahl 2021).

Read that carefully. It is a relative risk, not a prevalence. It does not mean 11% of Boerboels, or any percentage at all. It means that within this dataset a Boerboel was far likelier to be treated for a ruptured cruciate than an average dog. The confidence interval is wide because the breed contributed few cases, so the exact size of the risk is uncertain. The direction is not. If you own a Boerboel, keep it lean, keep the exercise sane while the joints are still forming, and take sudden hind-leg lameness seriously.

Do Boerboels have hip and elbow dysplasia?

There is no reliable breed-wide hip or elbow dysplasia rate for the Boerboel. None. That is not the same as saying the breed is clear; it is a large, heavy dog, and dysplasia is a real developmental problem in every giant breed. It means the specific percentages people quote are not trustworthy.

Two numbers dominate the search results. "65% of Boerboels have hip dysplasia, 25% elbow" traces to a single clinic sample of 20 dogs in Nigeria, animals brought to a veterinary hospital because something was already wrong (Ajadi 2019). That is textbook selection bias: you cannot measure a breed by looking only at the sick ones. The same research group's larger samples give different figures again, which is the tell that no stable rate exists. The other viral number, "48.2% dysplastic, fifth-worst breed, OFA December 2016," traces to a table republished by a commercial orthopedics retailer, not to the OFA, and the article it credits never mentions the Boerboel at all. A third figure that circulates on content farms, "3.94% orthopedic," has no sample and no source behind it. None of the three is citable.

Here is what to do instead of trusting a percentage. Ask to see both parents' hip and elbow results, graded by the OFA, PennHIP, or an equivalent scheme, and look at the actual certificates. No DNA test predicts hip or elbow dysplasia; the trait is polygenic and screened by X-ray, so a cheek-swab kit that "clears" a puppy for dysplasia is selling you something that does not exist. Our health testing guide covers what each result certifies, and why "health tested" is not the same as "healthy."

Are Boerboels prone to DCM or heart disease?

This is the claim we most want to correct, because generic Boerboel articles state it with total confidence. Dilated cardiomyopathy and subaortic stenosis are not established in the Boerboel. SAS appears in the veterinary literature as a one-off specimen, not as a breed pattern (Crofton 2023). The Boerboel is on no standard cardiology list of DCM-predisposed breeds, and where "the Boerboel is genetically predisposed to DCM" gets repeated, it usually traces to confusion with the Dogue de Bordeaux, a different French mastiff that does carry a documented DCM signal.

None of that means you should skip a cardiac exam. A responsible breeder has the breeding dogs' hearts checked by auscultation and, ideally, an echocardiogram, because heart disease can appear in any large breed and a screened parent is a screened parent. The point is narrower: do not let anyone sell you a Boerboel "DCM predisposition" as settled fact. It is not.

Bloat: the giant-breed emergency worth a plan

Gastric dilatation-volvulus, or bloat, is the one giant-breed risk that can kill a healthy dog in an afternoon. The stomach fills with gas and twists, cutting off its own blood supply. It is a surgical emergency, and deep-chested giants are the classic victims.

Two facts here are worth more than the rest of the internet's bloat advice combined. First, the single most-repeated piece of prevention is backwards. Raising the food bowl does not lower bloat risk; in the large-breed data it was associated with higher risk (Glickman 2000). Feed a Boerboel at ground level. Second, if you are genuinely worried about bloat, the strongest lever is a prophylactic gastropexy, a procedure that tacks the stomach to the body wall so it cannot twist, often done during a spay or neuter. In a series of 766 dogs, none went on to develop GDV afterward, with a minor-complication rate of 0.4% (de la Vega 2023). For comparison, well over half of dogs that bloat and are not pexied will bloat again. Learn the signs regardless: a swollen, hard belly, unproductive retching, drooling, restlessness, and fast collapse. That is a drive-to-the-emergency-vet-now situation, not a wait-and-see one. Feeding choices feed into this too, which we cover in our Boerboel feeding guide.

Cancer, weight, and the neutering question

Osteosarcoma, an aggressive bone cancer, scales hard with size. Giant breeds carry roughly 16 to 29 times a small dog's risk (VetCompass 2023). The Boerboel was not in that dataset, so read it as what being a giant dog costs, not a Boerboel-specific rate. Watch for persistent lameness or a firm swelling on a leg that does not resolve.

Two levers under your control actually move the odds, and one popular piece of advice needs a caveat. The best-evidenced longevity lever in dogs is simply keeping the animal lean. In a 14-year study, Labradors fed 25% less than their free-fed littermates lived a median of 13.0 versus 11.2 years, close to two extra years, on food restriction alone (Kealy et al., 2002). A Boerboel whose ribs you can feel will likely outlast a heavy one. The caveat is neutering. You will read that spaying or neutering reduces some cancers, which is true in narrow ways, but for a giant guardian the timing carries a real tradeoff: neutering before six months roughly tripled the joint-disorder rate in one large analysis (Hart 2020). For that reason the common guidance is to delay neutering giant males to around two years, once the growth plates have closed. Talk the timing through with your vet rather than defaulting to the standard six-month spay-neuter. Our size and growth guide explains why slow, lean growth protects the joints.

The Boerboel-documented rarities

A short list of conditions has actually been recorded in the breed, and one of them is a genuine world-first.

In early 2026, veterinary researchers described autoimmune lymphoproliferative syndrome (ALPS) in a Boerboel family, driven by a recessive mutation in the FAS gene, a 14-base-pair duplication (Tong 2026). It is the first documented case of ALPS in any dog, and the only disease-causing gene variant ever identified specifically in the Boerboel. Affected puppies showed signs at 8 to 11 weeks, and the immune-suppressing drug sirolimus helped. Keep it in proportion, though: it was found in a single family, it was absent from more than 3,000 other dogs tested, and there is no public screening test for it yet. It is a discovery, not a screening tool.

The breed also has a documented form of focal epilepsy with a fear-onset, "panic" presentation, described in five littermates from about three months of age (Stassen 2019). That paper is useful for a second reason: it specifically ruled out the metabolic-trigger story people reach for, because the dogs' bile acids and ammonia were normal. A small case series of ten young Boerboels with wobbler syndrome (cervical spondylomyelopathy, a compression of the neck spine) was reported out of Onderstepoort in South Africa (Gray 2003). And two recessive conditions have real DNA tests: CMR1, a retinal condition that rarely affects vision, and hyperuricosuria (HUU), which predisposes to urate bladder stones. Those are the tests a DNA panel can genuinely offer a Boerboel buyer.

How long do Boerboels live?

No one has measured it. The Boerboel does not appear in the large canine life-table studies, and the breed standard says nothing about longevity, so the "9 to 11 years" you see everywhere is an editorial estimate repeated in a circle, not data. The honest way to anchor it is with related Molossers, which are common enough to have real numbers (McMillan 2024):

Call it the neighborhood, not the address. Somewhere in the eight-to-eleven range is a reasonable expectation for a giant guardian, but it is a proxy, not a Boerboel measurement. Size itself is the headwind: bigger dogs age faster, which is why giant breeds cluster at the short end of the canine lifespan range. You cannot change your dog's frame. You can keep it lean, which is the one intervention with years of evidence behind it.

What a real Boerboel health screen looks like

Strip away the noise and buying a healthy Boerboel comes down to one request: show me the parents' hip, elbow, and heart results. A breeder who screens is not promising a problem-free puppy, because no one can. They are stacking the odds the only way the evidence supports.

Two cautions. A CHIC number certifies that a dog's testing was done and made public, not that the results were perfect, so read the actual grades rather than trusting the badge. And a consumer DNA kit confirms the breed and can flag CMR1 or HUU, but it cannot tell you the hips are sound. Only an X-ray can. When you are ready to compare breeders, our directory lets you filter for kennels that publish these results, and our editorial standards explain how we source everything on this page.