Dr. Lera Clone explains why dogs grind their teeth and what causes it. GI disease is a common culprit. Start with a proton pump inhibitor like omeprazole and a novel protein diet, then work through bloodwork, imaging, and endoscopy to find the real problem.
Hey, guys. Dr. Lara and Ginger here. Ginger is one of my two dogs. You may have seen Ruby and some of my other videos as well. And so the topic for the video today is going to be what we call bruxism. Now, you might wonder, what's bruxism? It's a fancy way of saying teeth grinding. Now, one of the things, you know, that people a lot of times would associate, at least in humans, teeth grinding is a lot of times some sort of stress. So we would think, one wonder if it's some sort of anxiety or something like that in dogs. The other thing that you could potentially assume or think would be if they have some sort of dental disease. And one would think that that makes logical sense. But one of the first things that should come to mind is that there is some sort of potential GI upset with dogs who are grinding their teeth. And so the typical first thing that we would usually do is we would look at putting the dogs on a proton pump inhibitor, like something called omeprazole. Omeprazole is, if I remember correctly, I think it's either Nexium. No, it's Prilosec. And so that's something that goes ahead. It's supposed to help settle the stomach. In the meanwhile, while we wait and try and figure out what the actual cause is of the grinding of the teeth, the initial things that you could potentially look at doing is potentially putting them on a novel protein diet. That means like, something like venison or something like fish or buffalo. Those are just some things. If we think that a patient is having grinding teeth secondary to some sort of GI disease, food allergies might be an issue. Or inflammatory bowel disease. Inflammatory bowel disease is kind of like irritable bowel syndrome or Crohn's in humans. I personally think that inflammatory bowel disease is actually food allergies, but that's a whole other conversation. So while we go ahead and start those trials in regards to tests and those kinds of things, typically what you're going to look at doing is you're going to have your veterinarian do a full blood panel, where we do what's called a CBC and a chemistry, as well as a urinalysis. And then we would look into having a fecal analysis done to see if there's any evidence of parasites. And then we. We would also look into having something called the cobalamin and folate, which is usually tied to absorption of nutrients and that kind of stuff. Some of the other different tests that we use for the GI tract would also be X rays as well as an abdominal ultrasound. And depending on how things that may end up to scoping. Scoping is where we go ahead and we stick a camera down the mouth, into the stomach and into the small intestines. And sometimes we will stick a camera up the colon and in through the larger intestines to collect some biopsies to see if we find anything abnormal. There is also a possibility where you don't necessarily have to go ahead and put your dog under anesthesia if you want to try and get the idea of what exactly is going on. They do have a camera that's in the size of a pill. It's only for dogs that are £40 and above, so Ginger would not be a candidate for that. And that's something where you go ahead, the dog swallows a pill and then there's a camera that starts recording the whole time. You would still potentially have to take biopsies, but it's a less invasive way or less risky way because the dog doesn't necessarily have to go on their genes, general anesthesia to collect the biopsies beforehand if the whole intestinal tract looks absolutely normal. So hopefully you guys found this video helpful. If you did, give us a thumbs up, subscribe and if you know somebody who needs to watch it, share it with them. I hope you guys are being safe and taking care of your pets. Take care and be healthy. Sam.
