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Hi. My name is Doctor Greg Stram here at Elk Grove Pet Clinic. I’d like to talk to you about the subject of geriatric pet health. If your cat or dog is suffering from arthritis you may also be interested in Pet Arthritis Laser Therapy.
Geriatric Pet Care catches problems early.
As animals get older, there are certain things that can happen to them. There’s the aging process. They can develop certain disease processes. If you catch these problems early on in their course, many of them are very treatable. This includes cancers and systemic diseases. This also includes special things that we could catch early and begin treating so that we can add many years to your pet’s life (if these problems are caught early).
Geriatric Pet Care starts with base line blood tests.
One of the reasons that we do this is because we do blood testing on patients when they come in for their annual vaccinations. Many times they are completely perfectly healthy, but we’ll get a blood work up on them just to get the basic numbers that we can look at down the road if the patient ever does get sick. If we have a baseline blood work up and (a year or two down the road) your cat or dog gets sick, then we’ve got normals from that patient from a year or two ago. Thus, we are able to do a comparison to the abnormal results that we have now. That helps us to make a diagnosis. We’ve got normal values for the different lab tests that we run. However, what might be normal for the majority of pets might not be normal for your pet. If we run a geriatric profile, then we have all of the numbers that we know are your patients’s normals. Down the road, we can see if there’s been any deviation from that.
Geriatric pets can have different problems that you might not notice right away. If we are doing an exam on them (say, every six months) we might catch something. This includes a situation where your cat or dog is slowly losing weight or maybe where the cat has been slowly gaining weight or when there is a situation where the animal is doing some behavior that might trigger something in our minds that it’s a disease process that’s beginning to show itself where you might not recognize that at home. You might just figure that the animal is just slowing down a little bit for some other reason.
Geriatric Pet Care detects fatal diseases.
There are lots of other pet diseases that come up later in life. This includes hypothyroidism, Cushing’s disease, and hyperthyroidism in cats. If problems like these are caught early and we begin treating these problems, then these animals can sometimes expect to lead a normal life. Some cancers (if caught early) can be surgically removed. Thus, those cancers can be curative. If left unchecked, they continue to grow and continue to spread. Once they spread to other organs and spread through the blood and spread throughout the body, then they are not going to be as easy to treat as compared to when we catch them early.
Geriatric Pet Care includes a 6-month Geriatric Checkup.
A geriatric exam, a geriatric blood work procedure, and bringing in the pet on a more regular basis (more often than just for the annual vaccinations) can really help to extend your pet’s life. It’s good to catch something early enough (such as dental disease) and catch it before it gets too bad (when your pet starts losing teeth). We want to get those teeth cleaned up in order to extend your pet’s life.
It’s very important to see these patients as they get older. We figure that pet geriatrics is any dog (or cat) that is getting up over the age of 10. Maybe at that point, we need to start thinking about doing blood work on these pets and maybe doing some survey X-rays and routine exams in order to catch pet health problems early before they get out of hand.
Schedule a Geriatric Pet Care at www.ElkGroveVet.com
YouTube Link
Youtube Title: Geriatric Pet Care ( Elk Grove Village IL, Schaumburg IL, Itasca IL)
Geriatric Pet Examinations may catch fatal dog cancers or feline hyperthyroidism early. It is much easier and cheaper to treat pet old age diseases early.
