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 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 […]
Read Post »Low albumin in dogs can turn up on a routine senior panel as easily as in a workup for ongoing diarrhea or weight loss. Either way, the flagged number is not a diagnosis. It tells you the body is failing to make this protein, losing it, or letting it leak out of the bloodstream into […]
Read Post »If your vet wants a bile acid test, or your dog’s result just came back high, you are probably wondering how worried to be. The test takes a morning: one blood sample before a meal, a small meal, two hours of waiting, then a second sample. The wait between samples is part of the test […]
Read Post »A yellow tinge to the whites of your dog’s eyes can be the first hint, and for other dogs the first hint is a bilirubin value flagged high on a lab report. Either way, that yellow is jaundice, and it means bilirubin, a yellow pigment, is building up in the body. A high result is […]
Read Post »What a High GGT Points To A high GGT on your dog’s bloodwork usually points to irritation or slowed drainage somewhere in the bile ducts, not to liver failure. What it means depends on how many days into a problem the blood was drawn. The same value can mean two different things on day two […]
Read Post »AST sits mostly in two places, muscle and the liver, and that split is what makes a flagged AST on your dog’s blood chemistry results tricky to read. A high value means that cells somewhere in the body have been disrupted. The number alone cannot tell you whether the cause was a strained muscle, a […]
Read Post »Your dog’s blood results came back with one line flagged high: ALP, short for alkaline phosphatase. On its own, that flag does not mean something serious is wrong. ALP is one of the most commonly raised values on a canine chemistry panel, and on a page full of flags it is often one of the […]
Read Post »When your dog’s liver bloodwork comes back with ALT, ALP, AST, or GGT flagged in red, the number alone tells you less than it seems to. These four are the values on a chemistry panel that get grouped as liver enzymes. A raised one means liver cells are stressed, turning over faster than usual, or […]
Read Post »Your vet circled ALT on your dog's bloodwork, and now you are staring at a number with no context. ALT is a clue, not a diagnosis, and reading it right starts with how your dog is actually doing.
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