So hello and welcome back to this Small Animal Clinical podcast series, brought to you from the Royal Veterinary College in London.

My name is Shailen Jassani.

Today it's my great pleasure to welcome Vicki Lipscomb to the podcast.

Vicki is a diplomat of the European College of Veterinary Surgeons, a senior lecturer in small animal surgery,

and head of the soft tissue surgery service

here at the Queen Mother Hospital for Animals. So thanks very much for joining me today, Vicky.

So today, Vicky, I'd like to talk about porto-systemic shunts. I kind of went around the houses

thinking we're going to shorten that to something, but I've sort of decided we're just going to

call them for a systemic shunts, which is an area that I know that you have a particular interest in

and I guess the best place to start is by asking you to please kind of summarize essentially what a porto

systemic shunt is and what are the different types and sort of whether that has any implications for

the patient and then we'll go on and talk a little bit about kind of more pathophys stuff if that's

okay thanks shale and it's good to be here um yes a porta systemic shunt is essentially an abnormal

vessel um they are often um congenital in cats and dogs, and they may be inherited.

Can you do me a favour and clarify to the list of the difference in congenital and inherited?

Congenital is something that you are born with, and inherited is something that has been inherited.

So you could be born with a cleft palate, for example,

that is therefore congenital, but it's not inherited.

Whereas we know specifically because work has been done in,

for example, Yorkshire Terriers and Irish Warpants,

that some shunts are actually inherited as well as congenital.

So would it be crazy to say that you could have an inherited shun that would not manifest

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