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Originally Posted by dwerten  a dog with symptoms of mvd needs to be on 18% protein or less and nb vegetarian is low protein - wow that is very surprising no shunt after surgery wow this is shocking to me too - did the scintigraphy show a shunt? wow at least she was spayed and that is resolved but poor baby that incision is not fun - so did they biopsy the liver and determine mvd ? she must have been on high protein to have displayed such bad symptoms in beginning poor little thing but most puppy foods are high in protein  still in shock at this news as thought bile acids were a very good indicator and over 100 more a shunt and never heard of a low number like 30 indicating a shunt wow my dd was below 100 but over 25 but no symptoms just came up on 3 bile acid tests. Well at least you have a firm diagnosis which is important and maybe with low protein diet she can eventually just eat that and may not need meds in future. I will say there was a yorkie on here no signs and at 3 years old had some diarrhea and they opened him up at dr tobias and he had multiple shunts so i guess it is hit and miss in some cases |
The scintigraphy that she had done (a month before surgery) was "cloudy" but they said it showed a shunt (it was just not as localized as they'd like... so I fully expected them to do another the day before surgery but they elected not to b/c they were pretty confident it was a shunt. When they do a liver biopsy, the results of having a LS and MVD would be the same. So if she DID have a shunt, there is no way for them to determine whether or not she had MVD with the biopsy alone, it would take months to determine that (if her bile acids did not go down dramatically). Since there was no shunt, they automatically know it is MVD. Does that make sense? The ONLY way for a biopsy to say whether or not a dog has MVD definitively is if they have no shunt. This was new news to me at the time.
So far she has done wonderful with the RCLS and LD. She loves it. She is pretty much at 3lb now (yay!).