Health

Purchasing veterinary medications such as heartworm preventatives online can offer significant cost savings, but how can you be sure that you're buying the real thing and not counterfeit products from China, which can be impossible to tell apart? I recently read about a dog who tested positive for heartworms despite being given monthly preventative medications. The reason may be that the heartworm preventative the owner purchased online was not what it claimed to be.

A new 20-year retrospective study from the University of Georgia examined causes of death in dogs between 1984 and 2004. Researchers looked at records of 74,566 dogs from the Veterinary Medical Database, which includes data from 27 veterinary teaching hospitals. These results may be biased toward more severe, complicated, or unusual causes than the general dog population, but are fascinating nonetheless. The study grouped deaths by organ system and by disease category (“pathophysiological process”), and analyzed results based on age, breed, and average breed size. Eighty-two breeds with at least 100 representatives were included in breed-based analyses; mixed-breed dogs were considered as one group.

I have always run titers on my dogs before vaccinating and my vet provided individual doses when required. This year was different. The office manager called and said their practice could no longer provide individual vaccines, as in the past. I vaccinate only for parvo, distemper when titers are low, and rabies. I was quite upset because one of my dogs needed only distemper and my other dog’s titers were good. I posed the question, “Why offer titers, if you are not able to provide individual vaccines? Big silence! Well, I know the answer.

The Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine and Wake Forest University’s Institute for Regenerative Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, signed an agreement in January to form the Virginia Tech/Wake Forest Center for Veterinary Regenerative Medicine (CVRM). The goal is to facilitate the use of cutting-edge, regenerative (stem cell) treatments for pets and people. Clinical trials performed at the center will provide valuable information concerning the effects of stem-cell therapy.

Maybe this has happened to you: You’re reading or watching TV or at your computer, and your dog is lying on the carpet near you. You’re absorbed in what you are doing, but all of a sudden, you realize that your dog is licking or chewing himself, or scratching his ear with a hind paw. “Hey!” you say to your dog. “Stop that!” Your dog stops, looks at you, and wags his tail. You go back to doing what you were doing – and a few minutes later, you hear the tell-tale sounds of licking or chewing or scratching again. Every dog does a certain amount of self-grooming to keep himself clean – and every dog owner should be aware of how much is normal, and how much is too much, because “too much” is often the first indication that a dog is having an allergy attack.

Your dog is limping and you don’t know why, so you take him to your veterinarian. The vet pushes, pulls, and palpates and announces that your dog probably has torn ligaments in his knee. She says that he needs surgery, and she can take care of that. While you love your dog’s vet, you’re just not sure that you agree, and you’re also unsure whether surgery is the route you want to take. You feel uncomfortable thinking the thought, but wonder what another veterinarian might recommend.

Excessive self-licking and chewing can be caused by a medical issue. It can also be a behavioral problem, a classic example of an obsessive/compulsive disorder. Either way, it's annoying to the dog's human companion, and dangerous to the health of the dog. Here are tips for dealing with dogs who self-lick and chew excessively. To begin behavior modification, determine your dog's stressors and start eliminating them. Make a list of everything?you can think that is stresses your dog – even just a little bit, even if the stressors don't seem directly related to the licking. Your list might include thunder, small children, dogs on television, cats, riding in cars, visits to the vet, shock collars, medical issues, and many more. Most owners can identify between 10 and 20 stressors for their dogs.

An Allergen is defined as a substance that causes an allergic reaction. Anything can be an allergen to a hypersensitive individual, even water. The term has meaning only in relation to an individual who is hypersensitive to that substance.

Allergies are not the only reason that dogs itch. In fact, to properly diagnose hypersensitivity, one of the first things a veterinarian needs to do is to rule out other potential causes of itching. Allergies are a diagnosis of exclusion

There are a few different types of tests available that purport to identify the allergens to which a dog is hypersensitive; some of them are helpful, and some are a waste of time and money. Since all of them are commonly referred to as allergy tests

A valid food elimination trial for the purpose of confirming food hypersensitivity consists of three phases: elimination, challenge, and provocation. In the first (elimination) phase, the dog is fed a diet consisting of a single protein source and a single carbohydrate source. Both of these ingredients should be completely “novel” to the dog – foods he’s never eaten before. (Thirty years ago, lamb and rice was the go-to food elimination diet, because those ingredients were not yet widely available in commercial pet foods. Because the diet was novel, few dogs had developed allergies to those ingredients, and “lamb and rice” gained an unearned reputation as a “hypoallergenic” diet.

There are almost as many opinions among veterinarians concerning the use of corticosteroids as there are veterinarians. Some feel that these drugs – prednisone, prednisolone, methylprednisolone, and dexamethasone foremost among them – are invaluable to every dog who itches; some feel that corticosteroids ought to be used only as a last resort, and only for short periods and in small amounts. Still others regard them as verboten. Why are these drugs so controversial?