Have you seen this on your reminder card and wondered what it’s all about? Well, Senior Wellness Blood Screening is something we recommend for all patients seven years of age or older. It entails drawing a blood sample from your pet and sending it to the lab with a urine sample if one is available. What we get back is a lab report telling us how all your pet’s organs are working. This is very valuable information for many reasons.
Senior Wellness Blood Screenings give us a healthy baseline of your pet’s blood. This will give us comparison values should your pet become ill in the next year.
In some cases, pets coming to us for treatment due to illness have been hiding their condition for a year or more. With these profiles, we are more likely to catch diseases in their early stages and are usually able to treat more effectively – and less expensively.
Animals age, on average, seven times faster than humans. Illnesses that sometimes take a human a year or more to develop, can take only a few months for dogs and cats.
Early diagnosis and treatment can extend your pet’s life expectancy and quality of life.
Medications, including vitamins, must pass through internal organs to be metabolized by the body. Over time, these medications can cause serious damage which is most often not readily evident from physical signs alone.
Recent studies have shown that as many as 23% of pets appearing clinically healthy upon a physical exam had underlying health issues. These included: hyper- and hypothyroidism, diabetes, early and advanced renal (kidney) failure, liver disease, and urinary tract infections.