Dr. Lera Clone explains urinary incontinence in dogs using Honey, a small-breed dog with recent accidents, as a case study. Urethral sphincter mechanism insufficiency is the most common cause, especially in spayed dogs. Diagnosis starts with urinalysis and bloodwork, and first-line treatment is often hormonal.
Hey, guys. Dr. Lara here. Today I'm here with. Oh, what is your name, young lady? No, I'm kidding. Today I am here with Honey. And Honey is coming in because she's had some accidents, urinary accidents. One on mom's lap, one on the couch. And then mom was saying that she looks like she's actually, her blanket has actually been smelling of urine. And she's noticed this over the last week or so. So one of the things that people will wonder is, is my dog incontinent? And what incontinence typically means is that they don't have control of their bladder sphincter. So if your dog is having, is actually having accidents and you see it happening, they are conscious of what's going on versus and that's not urinary incontinence versus if the dog is sleeping and then they wake up and they have a wet spot where they were sleeping, that is more the definition of urinary incontinence. Now the thing that there are a lot of different potential things that could potentially cause this. The most common thing is something called usmi, which is urethral sphincter mechanism insufficiency or something along those lines. And if you just look up USMI dogs, urinary incontinence, that's going to be the most common cause of incontinence in dogs. Now it's typically something that is more commonly seen either shortly after being spayed in larger breed dogs or around 5 to 6 years of age in larger breed dogs. Honey, on the other hand, is a small breed dog. And so a lot of the times what we may consider with larger breed dogs when we start to see this kind of thing is first we'll go ahead and do a urinalysis to see if there's any sort of issue there. And then the other thing that we will normally do is we will go ahead and maybe start them on a urinary incontinence medication. Now that medication is typically a hormone. And that is something, because a lot of times something some of the stuff that they experience the urinary incontinence from is hormone related. And so typically, if you see dogs that are spayed before six months of age, a lot of times you are going to see a lot more chances of urinary incontinence. The other thing is in smaller breed dogs, when I was talking to the internal medicine specialist about this particular case, she said because Honey is a smaller dog, she is more prone and feels that it's more important for us to lean more heavily in the direction of doing diagnostics for testing. So she recommended that we look at doing blood work to make sure that we don't have any sort of issues there. Talked about doing some X rays to see if we have any evidence of bladder stones. And then she talked about the fact that we would most likely have to do an ultrasound and potentially even what's called a cystoscopy, where we stick a catheter through her. A camera, rather, through her urethra and into her bladder so that we can evaluate all the. Nor the anatomy in there and see if there's anything abnormal going on that could potentially cause the urinary incontinence that we're seeing now. You can see honey is actually kind of getting relaxed. And this is one of the first times I've actually seen that. And that's with her. And that's most likely because I'm pretty much ignoring her and just talking to you guys. If you guys have any questions about this particular topic, please leave it in the comment box. If you found this video helpful, give us a thumbs up. Subscribe and if you know somebody who needs to watch it, share it with them. Thanks for watching. Please be safe and take care of yourselves.
