When should the operation be performed?
There are many different factors to weigh when determining the optimal time to spay a puppy, including health factors, behavioral factors, and your pets environment. Talk to your veterinarian to determine the best time to spay your pet.
Hysterectomy is an elective surgery that is performed to prevent the onset of many adverse health issues such as bone cancer and joint problems. In addition to the prevention of pregnancy and serious health conditions, it can also lessen the likelihood of the dog becoming obese or being incontinent. Intact females will remain at risk of developing pyometra, which is often difficult to diagnose until its too late, and will also experience a full heat if no spay is performed.
A hysterectomy is completely effective at rendering the dog incapable of breeding. If performed correctly, there should be minimal risk of stump pyometra. The dog will still go into heat, and mild discharge or blood may be seen. This procedure is permanent and will only need to be done once. The chances of resulting health issues are low, with the dog being at lower risk of developing many cancers and diseases than with an ovariohysterectomy.
As with any surgery, complications may arise from the use of general anesthesia. If any of the uterus remains after surgery, the dog may be susceptible to stump pyometra, which can be life-threatening. Leaving the ovaries in the dog may contribute to the growth in mammary tumors. As the dog ages, she will be more at risk for this problem. Adopting an annual mammary gland ultrasound into your vet care routine may help identify these tumors in their early stages.
The recovery for a hysterectomy is very similar to that of a traditional spay. The veterinarian will prescribe painkillers and all activity should be reduced for several weeks while the animal heals. Putting an Elizabethan collar on the dog will keep it from licking or biting at its incision. Food should be slowly introduced within the first two days after surgery. If the dog begins to vomit, report this to your veterinarian. Monitor the incision site for any signs of infection. Any breathing difficulties should also be made known to the vet.
Thank you for your question. At her age, that infection and surgery is a major procedure. It may take some time for her to recover from the surgery and the anesthesia. If she is having troubles, the best thing to do maybe to have a recheck with your veterinarian, as they can assess her, examine her, and see if she is okay. She may need further antibiotics, or pain medications. I hope that all goes well for her.
The next question is why vets haven’t made the change? I think it’s just they’re not comfortable and we’re trying to get that information out there, and really advertising and talking about why we just do an ovariectomy. You don’t need fancy laparoscopic equipment to do an ovariectomy. Your vets, any vet out there, can start doing an ovariectomy now, when they do their traditional spays. It’s actually easier because you don’t need to make as big of an incision, and you’re not trying to pull and stretch anything. So, vets can do ovariectomies without fancy equipment like we have. It’s just something that we need to continue to get this information out there, and let them know that it’s okay to do this.
Today I want to talk to you about spaying. And the difference between what we should be doing, and what a lot of vets are actually doing, which is an ovariohysterectomy verses an ovariectomy. We will discuss why it matters, what’s the benefit of doing one verses the other, and what’s the downside of doing one verses the other. I get a lot of questions about this, every day since we do our laparoscopic spay, and we only perform an ovariectomy. There’s a lot of misconceptions still persisting out there about what the risks are and what the benefits are.
So, I hope that clarifies why you would want to do an ovariectomy and the benefits of it, and if you have questions about that, please come in, and we’d love to talk to you about doing ovariectomy on your dog, and we do it laparoscopically, which has been shown to reduce pain in animals by so much. And there’s more information on our website about laparoscopic spays, I encourage you to look at. So schedule an exam if you have a question, and otherwise, thank you for watching,
What are the risks and what are the justifications for removing the uterus? Well a lot of people talk and worry about uterine cancer. Uterine cancer in dogs is 0.03% of all cancers. It’s really low. Of those, only 10% are malignant. So your chance of having a malignant uterine tumor is 0.003%, that’s basically nothing. And, if you remove the ovaries from a young age, a lot of those tumors are hormonally driven. So if the uterus isn’t getting those hormones over the course of their life, the chance of them having a uterine cancer, a uterine tumor develop, is basically nothing. And so that risk really isn’t a concern for me. Other people are worried about if you leave the uterus behind that there’s still the risk that they’ll get something called a pyometra, or an infection in their uterus. The thing is, you can’t get a pyometra unless there’s hormones to drive that infection. So that can happen, even in a traditional spay, if you do an ovariohysterectomy, and you leave just a little piece of the ovary behind, you can still get a pyometra. It’s called a stump pyometra. But if you’ve completely removed all of the ovarian tissue, that’s not going to happen unless you’re actively rubbing progesterone onto the dog. So if you’re a woman who’s doing progesterone replacement therapy on your skin, that would be a potential issue. But that would happen with both a traditional spay, which is an ovariohysterectomy, and a ovariectomy. So again, that one’s not a risk either.
Let’s all get back on the same page. When we spay a dog, you can do one of two procedures. The traditional way of spaying a dog is you remove the ovaries and the uterus. And that’s called an ovariohysterectomy. And it’s what we’ve been doing here in the United States for all time and eternity, but nobody really stopped to ask why we’re doing it this way. Once we did, we figured out, oh yeah, there’s no point in removing the uterus. There’s really no benefit to it. And this is the way that they’ve been doing it in Europe for the past 20+ years, by only removing the ovaries, and they found no increase risk of problem or issues by leaving that uterus behind.
Do female dogs change after being spayed?
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Today I want to talk to you about spaying. And the difference between what we should be doing, and what a lot of vets are actually doing, which is an ovariohysterectomy verses an ovariectomy. We will discuss why it matters, what’s the benefit of doing one verses the other, and what’s the downside of doing one verses the other. I get a lot of questions about this, every day since we do our laparoscopic spay, and we only perform an ovariectomy. There’s a lot of misconceptions still persisting out there about what the risks are and what the benefits are.
Let’s all get back on the same page. When we spay a dog, you can do one of two procedures. The traditional way of spaying a dog is you remove the ovaries and the uterus. And that’s called an ovariohysterectomy. And it’s what we’ve been doing here in the United States for all time and eternity, but nobody really stopped to ask why we’re doing it this way. Once we did, we figured out, oh yeah, there’s no point in removing the uterus. There’s really no benefit to it. And this is the way that they’ve been doing it in Europe for the past 20+ years, by only removing the ovaries, and they found no increase risk of problem or issues by leaving that uterus behind.
What are the risks and what are the justifications for removing the uterus? Well a lot of people talk and worry about uterine cancer. Uterine cancer in dogs is 0.03% of all cancers. It’s really low. Of those, only 10% are malignant. So your chance of having a malignant uterine tumor is 0.003%, that’s basically nothing. And, if you remove the ovaries from a young age, a lot of those tumors are hormonally driven. So if the uterus isn’t getting those hormones over the course of their life, the chance of them having a uterine cancer, a uterine tumor develop, is basically nothing. And so that risk really isn’t a concern for me. Other people are worried about if you leave the uterus behind that there’s still the risk that they’ll get something called a pyometra, or an infection in their uterus. The thing is, you can’t get a pyometra unless there’s hormones to drive that infection. So that can happen, even in a traditional spay, if you do an ovariohysterectomy, and you leave just a little piece of the ovary behind, you can still get a pyometra. It’s called a stump pyometra. But if you’ve completely removed all of the ovarian tissue, that’s not going to happen unless you’re actively rubbing progesterone onto the dog. So if you’re a woman who’s doing progesterone replacement therapy on your skin, that would be a potential issue. But that would happen with both a traditional spay, which is an ovariohysterectomy, and a ovariectomy. So again, that one’s not a risk either.
What is the benefit of removing the uterus? Well, really there really isn’t. There is a downside though. There are risks and complications associated with actually removing the uterus, because when you do a spay, you’re really trying to make this tiny incision, and to get that uterus out of there, you’re really kind of pulling and yanking and stretching that uterus, and doing a lot of tissue trauma. And so there’s the risk that one of the blood vessels will not get tied off appropriately and they’ll bleed. You’re pulling and potentially stretching the other organs, and it’s just all the extra trauma that goes along with that spay, it’s a lot more painful, and a lot longer recovery time. So there really isn’t a benefit of removing the uterus.
The next question is why vets haven’t made the change? I think it’s just they’re not comfortable and we’re trying to get that information out there, and really advertising and talking about why we just do an ovariectomy. You don’t need fancy laparoscopic equipment to do an ovariectomy. Your vets, any vet out there, can start doing an ovariectomy now, when they do their traditional spays. It’s actually easier because you don’t need to make as big of an incision, and you’re not trying to pull and stretch anything. So, vets can do ovariectomies without fancy equipment like we have. It’s just something that we need to continue to get this information out there, and let them know that it’s okay to do this.
So, I hope that clarifies why you would want to do an ovariectomy and the benefits of it, and if you have questions about that, please come in, and we’d love to talk to you about doing ovariectomy on your dog, and we do it laparoscopically, which has been shown to reduce pain in animals by so much. And there’s more information on our website about laparoscopic spays, I encourage you to look at. So schedule an exam if you have a question, and otherwise, thank you for watching,