What Problems Can Urine Test For Animals Find

By: alexhg1/123rf — Deep yellow means the urine is concentrated. Your pet may exist dehydrated. Photo: alexhg1/123rf

I was having a veterinary nightmare the other dark.

Stuck in an episode of veterinarian Survivor, I was 44 nautical miles southward of Cape Disappointment with a sick dog named Spike. My challenge was to choose one and only one laboratory test to diagnose poor old Spike. What do you call up I picked? I chose to run a urinalysis.

The kidney is an amazing organ. A thorough urinalysis is like taking a magical looking drinking glass and spying into that kidney. But it's much more than that. A good urinalysis gives us information into many involved metabolic pathways in the body.

Let's outset with looking at one-time Spike while he lifts his leg. Sometimes the naked eye is all that is needed to pick up on a developing health problem. I check the color, the volume and the consistency of the urine, and information technology can tell me quite a bit almost a dog's condition.

Deep xanthous, calorie-free xanthous, light-green urine, reddish urine, viscous urine, a unlike-smelling urine: These are all helpful hints you might selection up on before your pet is showing any other signs of being sick. Get that urine sample to the vet! (Here are some tips for collecting a sample.)

Information technology's snow flavour back in the Northeast, and then I'm hearing a lot of "My canis familiaris peed in the snow and it was carmine!" Blood in the urine may accept been going on for a while, but thanks to the white stuff on the ground, we can now get to work diagnosing the trouble.

Urine as a Paint-by-Numbers Practise

Let'south say Spike's urine looks particularly nighttime — almost too dark. This could be normal or mean he's a scrap dehydrated.

If information technology has an orange tinge, it could hateful that Fasten is showtime to get jaundiced, which could signal a liver trouble. If it appears more than cherry-red than orange, meaning blood in the urine, nosotros need to end our analysis.

Deep yellowish to yellowish-orange: concentrated urine; bilirubin (liver, gallbladder)
Greenish: bilirubin
Carmine to orange to pink: blood in urine (hematuria)
Milky white: fat (lipiduria) or pus (pyuria)

For your everyday challenge of keeping your pet healthy, trust your powers of observation. If you remember at that place's something funky with the urine, accept it checked out.

Specific Gravity of Urine

Testing the specific gravity measures the urine'due south concentration. Is the urine dilute, like water, or concentrated? Urine concentration is an important aspect of overall wellness.

The specific gravity of the urine correlates to how much water the pet is drinking and how well the kidneys are concentrating that water. Thirst, what causes it and what the kidneys do with fluid intake are very of import indicators of many possible illnesses and metabolic conditions.

The Dipstick

The dipstick is non a sequel to Dumb & Dumber. As part of a urinalysis, a few drops of urine are placed on a lab strip called a dipstick and, after lx seconds, nosotros learn a lot about your pet's urine.

This simple test measures the presence of certain substances and characteristics of the urine:

Blood: tin indicate infection, inflammation, tumor
Glucose: indicates diabetes
Poly peptide: indicates inflammation or certain diseases
pH: if the pH is not in the normal range, it can promote urinary infection or float rock evolution
Ketones: these should never be nowadays in a healthy beast
Bilirubin: early indication of liver or metabolic disease

Urine Sediment

When you spin urine in a centrifuge, all the interesting things that may be in that urine settle down into the bottom of the tube. This is called the sediment. You examine the sediment with a special lab stain under a microscope and notice lots near the patient.

You need a very good microscope and a trained eye to analyze a urine sediment properly.

Cells: A normal urine sample should non incorporate many cells. If white blood cells, carmine blood cells or transitional cells are present, the urine is non normal and illness is indicated.
Casts: Casts expect similar lilliputian tubes or cylinders. This is considering they are castoffs from the renal tubules. When a kidney sends a cast into the urine, it about often means the kidney is angry about something. The cast is highly suggestive of an inflammatory condition.
Crystals: These beautiful lilliputian structures look exactly like their proper name suggests. In that location are several kinds of crystals found in urine, and they tin can exist identified by their shape and properties. Although some crystals can be found in normal urine, crystals bespeak you need to expect further to observe out if they are significant. They may indicate the presence of bladder stones or infection.

Tests Beyond a Urinalysis

Specialized tests on urine can be of nifty value if the patient's symptoms or an abnormal urinalysis tells you lot to wait further. These are not office of a standard urinalysis.

Culture and sensitivity: If in that location is a serious infection in the urine or if your patient is compromised with a disease such as diabetes, a urine sample taken straight from the float can exist cultured to meet if pathogenic bacteria are present. And then a sensitivity can be run to run into which antibiotic is the all-time choice to gainsay the infection. In other words, the urine is cultured to see if leaner grows, and and then nosotros detect out if that bacteria is sensitive to certain antibiotics.
Urine protein: Tracking excessive protein in urine is important in certain disease processes. Over time, it gives us of import diagnostic information and is a noninvasive exam.

Did I Win the Challenge?

Many of my cases are like Survivor challenges because I'm frequently not able to run all the diagnostics that would assistance me solve the case. If your veterinarian is pressing you to bring in a urine sample or emphasizing that a urinalysis is function of a thorough medical workup, it's truthful.

Stranded off the great Cascadia Bowl, as I look into Fasten's ill eyes and try to win the Survivor challenge and return Spike to health, I'd check his urine offset.

This pet health content was written by a veterinarian, Dr. Debora Lichtenberg, VMD. It was reviewed for accuracy by Dr. Pippa Elliott, BVMS, MRCVS, and was last updated December. 17, 2018.

Source: https://www.petful.com/pet-health/what-can-you-learn-from-urine-test/

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