10/24/2026
As our litters are preparing for titre tests I am sharing this again.
I put in a lot of extra time, effort & money to get my girls' nomographs done each litter. Having the advantage of a more predictable vaccine schedule is important to me. It is incredibly disheartening to hear veterinary staff dismiss the value of a nomograph. Often they encourage puppy owners to ignore it, or break their contract altogether. My answer is always "Ask them why the puppy series was developed". The answer is because we don't know when vaccines will actually work.
Well.... guess what a nomograph's exact job is? To give us a better idea of WHEN the vaccine will work. 💕
A recent study demonstrated that using nomographs to time vaccines improved puppy immunization. (link in comments)
Nomograph testing will tell you approximately when maternally derived antibodies will wear off and when your puppies are likely to mount an immune response to a vaccination.
Your vet will collect serum and submit it to the University of Wisconsin. I really have no idea why this is not offered routinely by veterinarians during a pre-breeding exam as it's super useful information and not very costly.
While this can keep unnecessary vaccines to a minimum, it can also give you valuable information about early socialization and balancing the relative risks. This is NOT intended as veterinary advice but if, hypothetically, you know that the MDAs in your puppies are still going to be going strong at 6 weeks, you will have a different set of biosafety concerns than if you know they are wearing off at 6 weeks.
But keep in mind, the nomographs will only tell you WHEN the MDAs will wear off, they will not tell you WHAT LEVEL of MDAs the puppies will receive. Even if your dam has excellent levels of immunoglobulins and produces great colostrum, the puppies can still (for a myriad of reasons) not wind up with great levels of immunoglobulins. (Link to my article on this in the comments).
And while we are on the subject of veterinary advice (and not giving it) keep in mind that the nomographs only give information on MDAs for a small group of diseases - they are still lots and lots of diseases your puppies can get, even if they have high MDAs for the things tested on the nomographs, so you should ALWAYS use caution and appropriate biosafety measures when doing early socialization.
We use the nomograph to determine the earliest date we should vaccinate, and then we pull a titer two weeks later to determine if an immune response has been mounted in the puppy. Once we determine that the puppy is immunized via titer results, we can be less conservative in our socialization activities, at least from a biosafety standpoint.
At the end of the day nomograph testing is a super useful tool that we think should be part of a wellness protocol for every breeding bitch. BUT nomographs are one piece of the puzzle, not a blanket solution or answer. As we are always saying in Puppy Culture, the decision about where, how, and when to socialize your puppies is a highly personal decision based on local risk factors and benefits. Nomographs are just another piece you can add to get more information, but they don't change the need to weigh everything in the balance!
What I'd like to bring up that is not often mentioned, is that you should keep good records of not only when your dam was vaccinated, but exactly what vaccine was used. I recommend you ask the vet for the label from the vaccine and stick it onto the record of vaccination and put it in your dam's file.
