The hospital laboratory provides a multitude of diagnostic blood panels to better evaluate your pet’s health. These include a hematology complete blood count (CBC), serum biochemistries, and electrolytes.  These lab panel results can help identify signs of underlying stress, inflammation, infection, anemia, or other systemic organ dysfunctions (liver, kidneys, pancreas, intestines, etc.). To help ensure safe anesthesia for your pet we'll run the following tests (view PDF brochure).

Since our pets can’t tell us when they are sick or feeling ill, a  consequently  healthy appearing pet may disguise symptoms of an ailment or underlying disease.  One example is that a pet can lose up to 75% of their renal (kidney) function before exhibiting any visible signs of their illness.  Therefore, laboratory testing plays a major role in early detection and intervention in your pet’s annual wellness examination.  The recommend blood chemistries, urinalysis, and/ or internal parasite fecal testing, make available valuable information for the doctors to promote and enhance quality health care for your loving pet. These laboratory tests help ascertain a baseline of values which help evaluate your pet’s general health status.  If your pet should require any medical treatment or surgery, the lab results will be used in the future to compare with previous lab results to improve the diagnosis. It is important to remember that healthy pets can have varying lab results each and every time they are tested.  The doctors take various factors into consideration,  such as the pet’s age, weight, stress levels, physical condition, clinical symptoms, when evaluating the lab results.

If your pet is scheduled for any kind of anesthetic procedure associated with general surgery, radiology, or dental cleaning, the doctors highly recommend pre-anesthetic blood panel screenings before any of these procedures are performed.   The reason is that this will better define your pet’s hepatic, renal, and cardiovascular systems function which is essential to metabolize and excrete the required anesthetic drugs.

Parasite Infestation & Control

The management and control of diseases in our household pets that are caused by gastrointestinal parasites have become especially important because of the increasing public awareness of the potential zoonotic implications for humans.   The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate more than 10,000 cases of human infections with roundworms per year.  It is known that 90% of puppies are born with roundworms or acquire them shortly after birth from their mothers. Because of theses potential human health hazards, veterinarians have developed reliable diagnostic procedures to help identify companion animal parasitic organisms.  The collection and testing of small animal fecal samples is critical factor in the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of transmission of gastrointestinal parasitism in the family pets.