Kidney stones in dogs

The animal was brought into the clinic with symptoms of attempting to pass urine/stool constantly. The owner thought that she might have been constipated. The hair around the vulva was stained reddish due to a bloody discharge that was coming from the vagina.

If she was not spayed, the first thing that would have come to mind would have been an infection in the uterus.{{more}}

Her appetite was not good and she appeared quite distressed, nearly as distressed as the owner was because her pooch was sick.

She had an elevated temperature, but what alarmed me was what I felt on palpating the abdomen. It felt like a bag of rocks that were moving when I applied gentle pressure to it with my finger tips.

In my 23 years practising as a veterinarian, I have seen virtually every pathological condition that exists in animals in St Vincent and the Grenadines. On a regular basis, I see dogs and cats suffering from kidney stones that are like sand that clogs the urethra. I have also seen kidney stones 3” x 3” that had completely filled the lumen of the urinary bladder.

What I never saw was kidney stones the size crushed quarry stones of varying sizes, ranging from two inches to one inch to smaller, neatly packed into the bladder.

That’s what I saw after I decided to do an emergency surgery on the patient.

After palpating what felt like a bag of bricks in the abdomen, I immediately informed the owner that I had to do a surgical intervention. In other cases less revealing, I would do an x-ray to help with my diagnosis. In this case, for me there was no other option but to get in there to see for myself what was happening.

I removed the equivalent of a small plastic glass filled with stones from her urinary bladder.

The next day the patient was back to her normal self. Within two days she was reunited with her owner and I expect her to live to a ripe old age.

Nephrolithiasis is the medical term for the condition in which clusters of crystals or stones – known as nephroliths or, more commonly “kidney stones” – develop in the kidneys, bladder or urinary tract.

Both dogs and cats are susceptible to kidney stones. However, certain breeds of dogs are more susceptible to certain types of kidney stones than others.

There are a number of causes and risk factors that may contribute to the development of kidney stones, such as the over saturation of stone forming materials in the animal’s urine. Other potential causes include increased levels of calcium in the urine and blood, diets that produce high (alkaline) urine ph and recurrent urinary tract infections.

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