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  Discussion on Diet for Potential Kidney Failure
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Posted on Tuesday, Jan 11, 2000 - 1:37 pm:

Hi - I've been lurking for a while, but this is my first post - I hope it's in the right place! I have a 16yo TB gelding who may be in the beginning stages of kidney failure or disease. Late in the summer he got very lethargic and his coat dulled, but never lost any appetite, his water intake didn't decrease/increase, nor did his urine output. I put him on RedCell, and he immediately improved and got a shiny coat again. He had routine bloodwork (CDC and blood chemistry) taken, and it showed elevated levels of creatinine and one other (can't remember what it was), as well as being borderline anemic. A follow-up urinalisys showed that it was quite adequately concentrated, but had some bacteria. Repeat bloodwork has been taken (results not back yet), and my vet was going to put him on antibiotics in case the bacteria was not due to our "clean catch" method of collecting his urine. In your opinion, what is the best sort of diet to help in all ways possible to slow or halt any sort of age-related kidney failure?

Posted on Wednesday, Jan 12, 2000 - 5:53 am:

Hello Jordana,
Welcome to the stage light.

In 15 years of equine practice, I have only seen a few kidney diseases that might have been solely related to age, and these horses were all over 30 years old. Even then it took an adverse percipitating factor to throw them into failure. Primary chronic renal disease and failure are a rare entitiy in the horse and thought to be most often due to autoimmune disease.

What were the values of creatinine (CR) and BUN (probably the second chemistry you spoke of). Horses loose their ability to concentrate urine long before they loose the ability to excrete BUN and CR effectively. Since the horse concentrates and has normal water intake, it seems very unlikely that these represent early signs of kidney disease. They may have represented a degree of dehydration or a catabolic state, where tissues were being broken down at an increased rate.

I would also not recommend any treatment for cystitis based on urine culture alone: obtaining a sterile sample by collection or a urine stream is near impossible. Though a correctly collected fresh urine sample may have very few bacteria, it is rare that a sample collected in the field gets cultured immediately. Just an hour or so after collection bacteria proliferate in the sample.

Symptoms of cystitis are the same for horses as other species: frequent, difficult urination with the prescence of increased numbers of red and white blood cells in the urine. This should be the basis of the diagnosis of cystitis. You might ought to read the article on The Diagnosis of Anemia also it may contain helpful information.
DrO
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