Top 5 Veterinary Diagnostic Services

Vets might recommend particular tests when you take your furry companion for a checkup to treat and diagnose any health conditions and ensure your pet is in its best health. Prevention is crucial to maintain your pet’s prolonged life and well-being. In addition, this helps reduce the overall expense of pet parenting as you’re proactively preventing any onset of potential health conditions.

Regular wellness exams assist your vet in identifying any health issues early and ensure your pet receives the best care possible. So let’s discuss the common diagnostic procedures performed in vet laboratories to help you be knowledgeable about keeping your pet healthy.

Commonly Used Veterinary Diagnostic Procedures

Diagnostic examinations are executed to help the vet identify any illnesses that are brewing or developing inside your pet. Below are five common diagnostic examinations veterinarians, veterinary technicians, or vet labs perform to determine and tackle pet health conditions.

1. Urinalysis

Through a urine analyzer, veterinarians evaluate the chemical and physical composition of the urine. A urinalysis provides necessary diagnostic details regarding conditions affecting the genital and urinary systems and serious health problems like Cushing’s disease, diabetes, liver disease, and many more.

The urinalysis is vital to diagnostic evaluations of health conditions and essential to thorough preventive medicine programs. When you take your pet for a routine vet exam, expect urinalysis, CBC, thyroid hormone testing, and biochemistry profile to be done aside from assessing their general condition. You may browse the web to read more about the importance of routine pet exams.

2. Complete Blood Count (CBC)

Commonly used to perform blood examinations like CBC, a hematology analyzer evaluates the number of platelets, white blood cells, and red blood cells in a blood sample. The numbers of each cell type provide important information to precisely diagnose infections, leukemia, and anemia. If your pet is currently under treatment for a health condition, a CBC helps your veterinarian monitor how well your pet is responding to the treatment.

Veterinary labs that offer blood testing usually have an in-house veterinary pharmacy in Redondo Beach to provide your pet with any medications they might need to recover and heal faster.

3. Fecal examination

The veterinarian examines a pet’s feces under a microscope to look for clues about health conditions that are causing internal bleeding, pancreas disorders, and difficulties with digestion. Most importantly, fecal tests search for signs of intestinal parasites like giardia, hookworm, roundworm, tapeworm, and whipworm. Tapeworm segments, adult worms, or larvae may also be observed in the procedure.

4. Digital X-Rays

X-rays are essential diagnostic tools in the diagnosis of pets. With the high-quality radiographs provided by modern digital veterinary x-ray equipment, attending to diagnosing several pet disorders has now become easier. To achieve the best possible image, most veterinary labs and centers today have invested in modern x-ray devices and fully trained specialists that produce the best image possible.

Through the modern digital x-ray systems, your referring vets can access these content or images anytime through the internet, which promotes a smooth transition back to the referring vet. X-ray is also crucial in the field of vet surgery. Dogs that sprain a leg or crack a bone are examined on an x-ray machine before a veterinary surgeon tackles their condition.

5. Heartworm testing

Heartworm is an internal parasite that can’t be found through fecal exams. This is because they live in the blood arteries of the lungs and heart instead of the digestive system. An antigen test can detect heartworm proteins, called antigens, which are released in the dog’s bloodstream by adult female heartworms. Even if a canine is on heartworm prevention year-round, yearly heartworm testing is still necessary to ensure the prevention program works.