So hello and welcome back to the Small Animal Clinical Podcasts brought to you from the Royal Veterinary College in London. My name is Shailen Jassani. Today in the podcast I'm joined by Dr. Karen Allen-Schbach, who is an associate professor and reader in internal medicine here at the Queen Mother Hospital for Animals and also head of the clinical investigation center at the RVC.

Karen has a particular interest in gastroenterology and her main research interest is in

canine inflammatory bowel disease that we will talk about later on towards the end of the podcast.

So thanks very much for joining me today, Karen.

So what I would like to do today is to talk about

the approach to a dog that presents with a history of chronic intermittent gastrointestinal

science. So I think that's a sort of presentation in first opinion practice that's pretty common

and in referral practice too. And I'm kind of thinking about the sort of dog that has a little

bit of vomiting, but mostly diarrhea. And for the purposes of this podcast, I thought what we would do

would be to take the kind of scenario in which, you know, we're in first opinion practice.

And this is the first time this dog is being seen for these signs. So it's kind of a clean slate,

if you like. Um,

but before we do that, I wondered if you could just give us a reminder of kind of in simple,

in simple terms, the, um, the kind of pathophysiology behind vomiting in diarrhea. So basically,

what needs to be happening in the body for these problems to occur in simple terms of you can.

Yeah, absolutely. Good question. So I think how I try to think about it is that there's two big

categories of causes for chronic vomiting and diarrhea and it's really either extra gas intestinal

or intestinal, and I think that

is usually how I approach it and so for chronic it needs to be present for at least three weeks

or intermittently for longer and so that's the definition of it and then usually that also means that

it hasn't gone away with sort of symptomatic

treatment in acute cases as well. And then what you try to do is sort of remember what kind

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