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Juvenile Renal Disease - (Renal Dysplasia)
This page is dedicated to Charley, our brown Poodle who died of Juvenile Renal Disease on June 19. He was only 18 months old when he died. I had no clue he had Juvenile Renal Disease, as I barely knew about the disease. What prompted me to take him to the vet in the first place was what I thought, an intestinal obstruction at the time, since he was prone to eating socks. He was vomiting, not eating and very lethargic. The vet felt around his abdomen area and said he didn’t think he had an obstruction, but sent us home with some medicine to help him, hopefully, pass any obstruction if he did have one. He told me to bring him back in the next day if he wasn’t any better. Well, he slept all that day and night and didn’t eat, so I took him in the next day again. This time, the vet decided to do blood work. The result came back showing his BUN (blood urea nitrogen) and creatinine levels were off the chart! They immediately started him on fluid IVs and something to help control his vomiting. They continued this over the next several days, rechecking his blood every day as well. His BUN and creatinine levels were not coming down. They also did an ultrasound of his kidneys and found that they were small and malformed. When I went and saw him on the fourth day, he was looking worse than when I first took him in. He had lost weight was still vomiting and could barely hold his head up. Since his prognosis was not good, I decided it was best to opt for Euthanasia. It was a hard decision to make and dealing with the loss of a pet is never easy. I was quite upset at the time, and never even thought of having a necroscopy performed on him. Luckily, the vet was very curious as to what had happened to his kidneys and performed one anyway at no charge. He sent the kidney samples off to a lab to have them analyzed and that’s how I found out that he had JRD. After reading up on the disease and looking back to the time that we first got him, I now know what the symptoms of JRD are. He drank more water and urinated more than my other two Poodles. He was the hardest to housebreak of all my Poodles and constantly leaked urine, even in his sleep. He had a funny odor to his breath and his teeth were discolored which are also signs of the disease. Up until the point when I had to finally take him to the vet, he was a happy-go-lucky, lively puppy! Apparently, dogs don’t really start acting sick until only about 25% of their kidney function remains. I did find out that this is a heredity disease and dogs with even a mild case, should not be bred. The prognosis is generally not good for dogs having this disease in its advanced stage like Charley had. Some dogs with mild cases can go on to live reasonably normal lives with proper nutrition and medication. I hope I’ve given you a brief insight as to what Juvenile Renal Disease is. If you’d like more in-depth information, the following websites are very informative: Juvenile Renal Disease in Standard Poodles Return to Home Page from Juvenile Renal Disease Page
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