 Thank you again, Ladymom.
I owe you big time for finding that WSAVA 2006 Congress piece. I read that article some time back and that was one of the things that gave me the idea that people should not panic and rush into anything when facing Liver Shunt. It says right there in the article that they've seen elderly dogs that lived normally their whole lives with liver shunts, and that many milder cases could be medically managed. They say this in the same paragraph where they talk about the failure rate of surgery. I think they're trying to say that people really need to weigh all the risks and comparative benefits before opting for surgery, and that a Liver Shunt diagnosis is not a death sentence. At least, that's the message I get out of it.
The wonderful news coming out of all this reading is that Dr. Center and her colleagues at Cornell are close to developing a test that will help identify which dogs not to breed. |