Dr. Lera Clone walks through what happens when a dog eats grapes, using a golden retriever puppy named Artemis as an example. The toxic agent is unknown, but treatment starts with induced vomiting and activated charcoal, followed by IV fluids for 48 to 72 hours while vets monitor kidney function through blood work and urine output. Artemis recovered and stayed clinically active after rechecking three days later.
Questions this video answers
48–72 hours
SDMA, creatinine, phosphorus, BUN
Above 160 mmHg (normal usually no higher than 140 mmHg); example reading 175 mmHg for Artemis)
Three days
Chapters
Hey, guys. Dr. Lara here today. I am here with Artemis. Artemis is a golden retriever puppy. As you can see, she's got plenty of energy. And the purpose of the video today is talking about grape ingestion. So stay tuned, and we'll get into why that can be a problem. All right, guys, so as you can see, Artemis has got plenty of energy, and there's a decent chance that I'm potentially going to give her to Bert. But so Artemis is here today because she went ahead and she ate some grapes on Saturday. And so, you know, grapes are known to have a possibility of being a kidney toxin and causing damage. And so we don't know, as we don't know a whole lot about toxins or like the grapes, what. What exactly in the grape causes it. We don't even know which species of grape cause it. We don't know which dogs will respond to it. Bert, if you want to go ahead and take Artemis, you know, she is the, you know, one. If your dog were to go ahead and ingest grapes, it would be something that. And, Bert, you can bring her inside if you want. It's something that normally is going to be treated as if they've ingested something like a toxin. And so it's something where we want to go ahead, and we want to ideally try and get them to vomit it up as quickly as possible. We want to. So there are a couple of different ways we can do that. We can give some injectable drugs. We can give some drugs in the eye. It just really depends on the emergency clinic and kind of what they have or what your hospital has on hand. The other thing that typically we will do or that you might do is we might try to give some activated charcoal. That stuff is a ton of fun to administer. Notice the sarcasm? It's this ash paste that doesn't taste very good. It's typically a complete mess and disaster when we are trying to administer that to patients. And so I don't think they administered it to Artemis. I'm not shocked. But they did give her some fluids just to kind of go ahead and give her a little bit of support. There is some new data coming out from the ASPCA recently. I was talking to an internal medicine specialist right before I made this video, and as I was doing some research, and they were saying that they think that they're starting to get closer to finding out what the actual cause or what the toxin is or the ingredient or the chemical or the agent that is actually causing the damage to the kidneys. With the ingestion. Once we go ahead and get that ingestion or, you know, we've diagnosed it, then typically what we are going to do is we are going to go ahead and grab some blood work. We want to check out the kidney values. Sdma, creatinine, phosphorus, bun. Those are some of the blood values. We're going to want to check the urine to see more baseline. And that's also for the kidneys as well, just to see where everything is at. And then we're going to need to place these patients on IV fluids to go ahead and support the kidneys and try and flush out whatever it is that potentially was absorbed, if anything, hopefully not assuming that the patient is going to respond. Like I said, we don't know a lot about raisins and, or grapes and what potentially causes the toxic effect to the kidneys. We haven't seen any reported cases of, just in case you were wondering, any reported cases of wine causing issues or grape juice causing issues either. So just a heads up, there are some cases where dogs, where I've had clients that have brought dogs in that have adjusted grapes and they let them be and they were fine. And then there are other dogs that have ingested grapes and they've had major, major issues and gone into full blown kidney failure. So while we have them on IV fluids, we are typically going ahead and monitoring their urine production, making sure that they are producing the correct amount of urine. We also want to make sure that we are measuring their weight to confirm that they are not gaining weight as a result of the fluids that they are receiving. Because if their kidneys are not working correctly, they will not produce sufficient amounts of urine, which will mean that they will start gaining weight from all the fluids that we are giving to them. You are usually looking at about 48 to 72 hours of IV fluids and hospitalization, as well as monitoring of urine output, as well as making sure that their appetite is not changing and also checking their blood pressure. The reason we check their blood pressure is because one of the things that the kidneys do is they go ahead and they regulate the blood pressure. So with Artemis, Artemis is now three days out from her grape ingestion. We went ahead and rechecked the blood. We're sending it off to the laboratory because she seems to be acting fine, as you can tell, jumping around like a maniac. We are going ahead and checking her urine to see if there's any changes in the urine, any sort of protein, any sort of casts in her urine, as well as any change in her concentrating ability. And then we are also having mom and dad measure blood pressure at home. We did try measuring the blood pressure here. That revealed a high blood pressure. Usually the blood pressure, the part of the blood pressure that we're looking for is a systolic. And this, you know, when we're getting into the specifics, that's when the heart contracts and pushes the blood out. So we're looking for blood pressure above 160. Normal would be below that. Usually no higher than 140. 160 is the upper limit of what we would consider normal. Hers was at 175. That being said, I do anticipate that there is a decent chance that her blood pressure is elevated as a result of her being excited and being a puppy. So what I will normally do is I will have the clients take home the blood pressure monitor. They will go ahead and measure the blood pressure multiple times throughout the evening and maybe even a few times in the morning to see if we can get some regular results. If we are able to get some regular results, then the blood pressure that we got here was just as a result of her being excited and her being a puppy. That being said, if you guys have any questions about this particular video, please leave it in the comment box. If you found this video helpful, please give us a thumbs up. Subscribe and share with somebody that you think should watch it. Thanks for watching. Have a great day and have a blessed time. Bye Bye. It.
