When your companion animal is diagnosed with a problem involving the urinary tract, you need to consider all of your treatment options, which may include nutritional modification, medical therapy, surgical intervention, dialysis, and more. Here's where you can learn more about how our team-based clinical approach can help you and your animal.
Once the right diagnosis has been reached in your animal's case, we will define the appropriate treatment plan. Depending on the diagnosis, we may recommend:
Medical Management
Here you would work in conjunction with our Internal Medicine team. Internal Medicine staff apply the most advanced diagnostic methods and treatments to existing and emerging diseases and are actively engaged in basic and clinical research that is pushing forward the boundaries of medical science.
Nutritional counseling/dietary management
Nutrition is an essential part of preventative health care and managing disease. The Clinical Nutrition Service provides nutritional support recommendations and management expertise for dogs and cats with urological problems and diseases.
Extracorporeal Therapies
Extracorporeal therapies, including hemodialysis and therapeutic plasma exchange, are lifesaving procedures that utilize advanced technologies to filter the blood to remove harmful substances from the body. Learn more about ECT at Ryan Hospital...
Surgical Options
Sometimes, depending on the nature of an animal's problem or disease, surgery might be recommended. If your animal requires surgery, we offer a full range of surgical options, including:
Traditional Surgical Procedures
The Soft Tissue Surgery service at Penn Vet's Ryan Hospital specializes in treating dogs and cats that require surgery to treat conditions involving the urogenital system. Because of the large number of emergency cases we see at Ryan Hospital every year, our surgical specialists have extensive experience in a range of problems, including complex and unusual cases.
Feline Renal Transplantation
Renal transplantation is a treatment option for renal failure in cats. Kidney transplantation in the cat is a technically challenging procedure that requires a coordinated team of surgeons, anesthesiologists, and nursing staff. At Penn Vet, the donor and the recipient surgeries are performed simultaneously. Presently, 92 percent of cats receiving kidney transplants recover sufficiently and will go home following renal transplantation and approximately 60 to 70 percent of transplanted cats are alive and continuing to do well at one year after transplant.
Minimally-Invasive Surgery
Our surgical team applies groundbreaking techniques and utilizes the most advanced technology for prophylactic, diagnostic, and therapeutic surgical procedures. We are at the forefront in redefining how surgery is performed in companion animals.
Penn Vet is a pioneer in utilizing single port minimally invasive surgery for animals. Our state of the art single port equipment provides a less invasive, more precise approach to surgery that is not offered commonly in the northeast or even nationally.
Complex and basic surgeries can be performed through small incisions. As a result, pets experience a shorter hospital stay, less pain and scarring, are at less risk of wound infections, and return to normal activities more quickly when compared to traditional surgeries.
Interventional Radiology
The use of IR techniques in veterinary patients offers a number of advantages to more traditional therapies. These procedures are minimally invasive and can therefore lead to reduced peri-operative morbidity and mortality, shorter anesthesia times and shorter hospital stays. Some less equipment-intensive procedures can result in reduced costs as well. In addition, some techniques such as chemoembolization of tumors or palliative stenting for malignant obstructions offer treatment options for patients with various conditions that may not be amenable to standard therapies or when the standard-of-care treatments are associated with excessive morbidity, cost, or poor outcome.