Be sure to talk to your veterinarian about the most appropriate diet if your pet has a shunt and consider a consultation with a board-certified veterinary nutritionist if you need additional options or your pet is not doing well on the commercially available choices. Dalmatians often have a metabolic condition that requires a low-purine diet. Tracey Sandilands has written professionally since 1990, covering business, home ownership and pets.
. An experimental study in growing Great Dane dogs. Factors that modify the effect of excess calcium on skeletal development in puppies. Swart GR, Zillikens MC, van Vuure JK, van den Berg JW. Digestive Disorders Some shunts can be repaired with surgery or non-surgical interventional procedures but others either cannot be fixed or the treatment is too expensive for the pet owner. Influence of dietary calcium and phosphorus content in a fixed ratio on growth and development in Great Danes. Others have also reported success using this diet, and it is not as low in protein as the Dodds diet above, so it would be a better choice for most dogs. Heartworm Treatment As youre on this website right now, we can assume that you love pets and likely have a special dog or cat (or many) in your life. 
See Revised GARD Diet for a more complicated, but more complete, version of the same diet. My name is Mary Straus and you can email me at either As illustrated in Table 4, even though the dog was consuming a high number of calories, the intake of protein, Ca, P, and Cu was still below the US NRC RA. Unfortunately, growing animals are not immune to development of clinical conditions for which nutrient intake should be considered and modified.
CVJ. You can use the USDA Nutrient Database to check for amounts of these nutrients in specific foods. Dogs need fat for energy, and again, too little can cause problems. Copper intake in the dog described herein was below this amount and at 0.23 mg/kg BW0.75 when fed Diet B. //-->, Go to . Laflamme DP.
The dog weighed 27 kg and he had a body condition score (BCS) of 4 on a 9-point scale (4). Embolic coils are then introduced to promote gradual occlusion. The relation of calcium, phosphorus and fat levels to minimal calcium and phosphorus requirements. Diabetes Diets FOIA
Adding Fresh Foods It is important to feed proteins that are high-quality and low in purines. Senior Diets
This acts an antioxidant and protects the liver, promoting healthy liver function. Kidney Disease Learn more Low fat is also often recommended, but is only needed for dogs having problems with fat malabsorption. Body condition scoring as a tool to assess growth should be used with caution, however, as puppies can have a normal BCS but weigh too much for their age. The liver is the site for degradation of aromatic amino acids but not branched chain amino acids; thus, using protein ingredients with a higher proportion of branched chain amino acids compared to aromatic amino acids could be beneficial (14). Klein C, Thes M, Boswald LF, Kienzle E. Metabolisable energy intake and growth of privately owned growing dogs in comparison with official recommendations on the growth curve and energy supply. See this article on Copper Toxicity/Chronic Active Hepatitis for more information. Stones: Urate and Other Address all correspondence to Dr. Adronie Verbrugghe; e-mail: Case JB, Marvel SJ, Stiles MC, et al. While oatmeal, mushrooms, legumes and cauliflower are high-purine vegetables, the protein found in legumes is lower in purine than meat protein and therefore still a better choice than meat. Note this recipe doesn't include calcium. Both the amount and the type of protein can be important. The dog was also noted to have bilateral angular limb deformity in the hind limbs. Evaluation of the current diet revealed it to be inadequate to meet the nutrient requirements of a large breed puppy. Please remember that mildly elevated liver enzymes do not necessarily indicate liver disease. Diet Blei AT, Cordoba J. Hepatic encephalopathy. Comparison of nutrient intake at 2700 kcal ME for 3 veterinary exclusive therapeutic diets fed to a 27 kg Great Dane puppy with a portosystemic shunt, to US NRC 2006 RA growth requirements. The range of dietary Ca acceptable for growth in puppies is 3.0 to 6.25 g/1000 kcal ME, whereas the range for large breed puppies is 3.0 to 4.5 g/1000 kcal ME (6,16). Nutritional management of hepatic conditions. I regret that I no longer have much time to respond to questions.
See my Contact page for more information. Goat's milk is easier for dog's to digest than cow's milk.
I have also seen Alpha-Lipoic Acid (included in some of the combination supplements above) and Himalaya LiverCare recommended, as well as the general immune system booster Vetri-DMG. 1. An official website of the United States government. An individual approach is key for nutritional management of complicated canine veterinary medical cases and includes consideration of the patients life stage requirements when modifying nutrient intake to manage clinical disease. From 19 wk of age until 6 mo of age, the puppy was fed a different veterinary therapeutic liver diet (Diet B; Royal Canin Veterinary Exclusive Hepatic (Dry), Royal Canin Canada, Guelph, Ontario).
She reports that her vet is now using this with ten dogs and has had great results with all of them. Meyer H, Zentek J.
See this video for an example of a dog suffering from hepatic encephalopathy: Liver Shunt Behavior in a Yorkie named Ginger. Medical management included metronidazole [7.5 mg/kg body weight (BW), PO, q12h] and lactulose (dose not listed in medical history).