Practitioner's Challenge: Diagnosing and Managing the Challenging Senior Patient

Early disease recognition can help improve the quality of life for older dogs and cats. Thorough diagnostic efforts, including a complete urinalysis, are critical because geriatric pets frequently have abnormalities in multiple body systems and often receive long-term medications. Trending serial data evaluations on a pet and comparing to that patient's individual baseline results can prove to be a highly objective and effective means of characterizing developing disease in the clinically normal pattern or to determine if therapy is working appropriately.