Dear Rabbit Owners, We have recently noticed a trend with rabbits that are otherwise healthy sometimes having elevated or high alanine transferase (ALT) levels on our blood tests. Usually, this parameter is an indicator of liver cell damage and as a precaution, we had been advising owners to defer their rabbit’s surgery as their rabbits’ safety under general anaesthesia is of paramount importance to us and performing surgery with liver damage present is not in the interest of the rabbit. However, over the last few months, we started to track the numbers of otherwise healthy rabbits that have had elevated ALT levels and these were far higher than would be expected in the general population. Repeated testing found no lowering of the ALT levels in these rabbits even with medication but no other clinical signs of liver disease were found. This had us extremely concerned and we have since contacted Idexx Laboratories as well as rabbit medicine specialists in Australia and a conclusion has been reached with regards to healthy rabbits that have elevated ALT levels. If the rabbit is healthy, eating well and producing well-formed regular stools and is maintaining their body weight with a good body condition and the rabbit’s ALT levels are below 100 U/L, we will take the rabbit’s health to be normal and continue with carrying out surgery for the rabbit. For rabbits that do not meet all the above criteria, we encourage further testing of other liver enzymes aspartate aminotransferase (AST ) and gamma glutamyl transpeptidase (GGT ) levels to check for normalcy of the liver. If only the ALT levels are elevated out of all the liver enzymes, we will take the rabbit as an outlier from the reference range and that the rabbit has no liver disease but have owners continue to keep a watch on the rabbit to be on the safe side. Please be assured that we at The Animal Doctors Pte Ltd have the interest of your rabbit’s safety at heart. We do sincerely apologise to clients who may have been inconvenienced by the postponement of their rabbit’s surgery, but we can assure you that no malice was intended. Yours sincerely, The Directors of The Animal Doctors
Posted on: Wed, 04 Sep 2013 08:23:21 +0000
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