The call from the clinic arrives with a word attached, severe or critical or emergency, and almost never with an explanation of what the machine actually counted. The part that gets left out is this: a frightening result on a complete blood count is a sorting problem before it is a diagnosis. A severe result […]
Read Post »Creatinine flagged high on a screening panel, perhaps the one run before starting long-term arthritis medication, brings the word “kidney” into the conversation, and once it is there it is easy to assume the worst. High creatinine in dogs usually means the kidneys are filtering this waste product out of the blood more slowly than […]
Read Post »Of all the numbers on a chemistry panel, BUN is one of the easiest to move, so a line reading BUN, high, does not have to mean kidney failure. A dog who was a little dehydrated, or who ate a protein-heavy meal before the blood draw, can show a high BUN with healthy kidneys. So […]
Read Post »A flagged SDMA on your dog’s bloodwork is not a kidney disease diagnosis, even though it is easy to read it that way. The report shows SDMA a little over its limit while creatinine and everything else sits inside the normal range. That combination usually means reduced kidney filtration was picked up earlier than older […]
Read Post »A kidney panel runs on one plain rule: the numbers rise as filtration falls. Creatinine is a waste product of muscle metabolism, so it climbs once the kidneys stop clearing it as briskly as they should. BUN, short for blood urea nitrogen, tracks urea, a byproduct of protein metabolism that the liver makes and the […]
Read Post »Two kidney values that are normally read as a pair have split up: creatinine is flagged high, while BUN sits comfortably in range. Now you are trying to work out which number to believe. Most explanations of kidney values assume the two rise together, but they don’t have to. An isolated high creatinine does not […]
Read Post »Your dog has been drinking more water than usual, or asking to go out at night, and you are wondering whether the kidneys are behind it. They might be, and the early signs of kidney failure in dogs are easy to explain away, because a dog’s kidneys carry far more capacity than it needs. By […]
Read Post »A kidney value circled on a lab report is a frightening thing to read, and the honest answer to whether it can come back down arrives in stages, almost none of it on the day of the blood test. A first high result establishes only that filtration has slowed. Why it slowed, and whether it […]
Read Post »A dog that was bright on Friday and cannot keep water down by Sunday has a different problem from a dog whose creatinine has drifted up a little at every annual visit. Both lab reports can show the same high number, the same row on the printout, the same units, and still be two diseases […]
Read Post »A kidney panel reports three numbers, and the useful part is that they do not all go wrong at the same time. Creatinine is steady but slow to react. BUN moves for reasons that have nothing to do with the kidneys. SDMA tends to shift earliest. Read against each other, the three of them say […]
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