Anybody heard of Legge Perthes?

My mum's been to the vet's with Meg (6 months West Highland White) today, as she spotted her favouring a hind leg on one of their walks. Vet reckons it's a problem with the joint, possibly just some bruising, but could be the beginnings of this Legge Perthes disorder. I think it's where the femural head is starved of blood, and becomes inflamed and mishapen, possibly leading to chronic arthritis In 50 years of keeping westies my mum has never had one with any kind of lameness, and never even heard of this, but it seems that it's is something any westie breeding stock really ought to be tested for

Just wondering if anybody has any experience of it. It sounds like early treatment is important, and maybe there's something mum can do to help her out...

I've no experience of it, but I found Bichons can suffer from it when my sis said she was getting one, so tried to find out more with little sucess. However, here's some info I found:

http://www.vetinfo.com/dencyclopedia/deleggcp.html

HTH x

Its a known condition in Westies, they can do really well though with a femur head removal.
Dawn.

Thanks for that guys, so it seems the prognosis would not be too bad. I googled it last night, and it seems that overweight pups are more at risk. Meg's lovely and slim now, but she arrived at my mum's really overweight (her breeder is one of these that likes to see fat puppies ), so I wonder if that was a contributing factor...