The recheck sheet says lipase or cPLI is still flagged. The dog it came from has finished his dinner and is asleep on the kitchen floor. Those two facts disagree, and in a dog recovering from pancreatitis the disagreement is usually normal rather than ominous. In a straightforward acute case the values fall as the […]
Read Post »If your dog’s pancreatitis blood levels came back high, the first question is whether that makes this an emergency, and the answer depends on the dog far more than on the number. Severity in pancreatitis is read off the dog, not off the enzyme value, and that holds nearly all the way down. A dog […]
Read Post »Laboratories do print reference bands for the two pancreatitis blood tests, and the lipase normal range in dogs is the shakiest part of the report. One laboratory calls a dog’s lipase normal up to 118 U/L and another up to 228 U/L. That spread is why checking a flagged result against a number found online […]
Read Post »Your dog's cPLI test came back flagged, and now you are staring at bands labeled normal, equivocal, and positive without much sense of what any of them mean for your dog.
Read Post »Start With How Your Dog Is Acting High lipase in dogs sends most owners straight to the word pancreatitis, and that is a fair first guess. Pancreatitis in dogs is the condition most often tied to it, but kidney disease, Cushing’s disease, certain medications, and something your dog ate can also raise the number. Which […]
Read Post »There is no such thing as a high CBC. The complete blood count is not one number but three separate counts, of red blood cells, white blood cells and platelets, each with its own reference range and its own reasons for drifting. So when a report gets described as a high CBC, one or more […]
Read Post »A reference interval is a statistic, not a verdict. The laboratory measured a group of healthy dogs and drew a line around the middle 95% of them, which is worth knowing before reading a single flagged value, because it means a perfectly healthy dog can land slightly outside the range. The chart below collects the […]
Read Post »Two dogs can come back from the laboratory with nearly the same white blood cell count and have almost nothing in common. One is fighting a bacterial infection somewhere. The other was frightened of the car ride, or is taking prednisone, or is sore from something unrelated. Elevated white blood cells show up in both, […]
Read Post »Most abnormal CBC values in dogs do come back. That is the short answer, and it is worth having before anything else, because blood counts shift with hydration, stress, inflammation, infection, medications, and recovery from illness, and a great many of them drift back once the trigger is gone. Two things decide whether a particular […]
Read Post »Your dog's blood panel came back flagged for low platelets, and your dog may look completely fine, which makes the result more confusing, not less. This is one of the few numbers on a canine blood panel that can be wrong before anyone has read it. Platelets are not whole cells but small fragments. They […]
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