How Long Does Blood Work Take at a Vet?
Thanks to our in-house lab, our vets can perform a variety of tests and get results quickly. The tests themselves are relatively quick and can take minutes. Some tests may take somewhat longer. Your vet can provide an accurate timeframe.
The more information you give us, the better it always is. If your pet is acting normal and fine, thats great. It gives us a baseline. It tells us normal functions and values for all your pets organs, blood numbers, CBC, etc. If your pets not acting well, please tell us everything thats going on:
If you still have other questions and youd like to reach out to us, you can call us directly at 17026757000, you can email us, or you can reach out on social media. But please do reach out, and well get back to you as fast as we can.
Thats a wide-range answer. It depends on the type of diagnostic we are doing. That said, the earlier you come in and the more preventative care you do, the cheaper it can be because were ahead of it. Were on top of it, as opposed to bringing in your pet when theyre very sick, where there are more diagnostics and more issues arise. So the earlier you come in to give us those baselines, it helps us find whats going on a lot quicker, a lot cheaper, and a lot safer.
Youd have to check with your individual insurance. Some do cover lab tests, and some dont, but just call your insurance company and ask them what they do and do not cover.
It depends. If your pet comes in with a presenting condition, such as not feeling well or not acting like themselves, the blood work can give us a lot of information. If its something systemic, whether its an upset belly or just not acting quite right, we can sometimes get some early signs of what may be causing your pet not to feel very well.
We analyze chemistries, electrolyte status, hormone levels, and for hyperthyroidism, as well as the reverse condition, hypoyroidism, or a low thyroid function, that can indicate disease in a dogs body. These tests are important for evaluating the health of older dogs, dogs with signs of vomiting, diarrhea or toxin exposure, and dogs receiving long-term medications. We also test to assess general health before anesthesia.
At our hospitals, bloodwork is analyzed for your dog either urgently in hospital using our suite of laboratory analysis machines or at a specialized reference laboratory. The determination will be based on your dogs condition, the urgency of the results and whether or not specialized tests are required for your dog.
We analyze bloodwork to assess a Complete Blood Count (CBC), including red and white cell count, immunity status, and the measure of hemoglobin, or blood oxygen carrying ability. We also examine hydration status, anemia, infection, blood clotting ability, and immune system response. This is essential for dogs that have symptoms like fever, vomiting, diarrhea, weakness, pale gums, or loss of appetite. A CBC can also detect bleeding disorders or other unseen abnormalities as part of a pre-surgery risk assessment.
At our hospitals, blood tests for dogs are performed both on premises using our in-house laboratory and at a specialized outside laboratory. On-site laboratory allows us to urgently determine and diagnose health concerns for more rapid and successful medical intervention. The outside laboratory is utilized for screening bloodwork and specialized tests and typically carries a slightly longer turn around time.
The Importance of Blood Work for Your Dog
There are a bunch of different types of lab work, and usually those are performed when we have to try to figure out what may be causing your dog to be ill. It doesnt have to be related to illness, but usually, lab work is done to discover the cause of an illness or to detect if theres any illness there at all, like in the case of like heartworm disease or intestinal worms. Its not always obvious, but we do laboratory work to see if those things exist in that particular patient.
I think primarily for the reason I just mentioned. So some of them, specifically heartworm testing, stool samples, maybe even a urinalysis can be done more as preventative measures. And what I mean by that, preventative may not be the best word, but trying to uncover an illness before there are any clinical signs of illness. So I think thats where its important because its an early detection system to where we can address potentially an underlying or obscure disease before it becomes more obvious.
So this is when the answer could get rather large if I let it. Laboratory work. What does that mean? So we do things like urinalysis, fecal samples, or intestinal parasite screening as we like to call it, we do some blood work, which could be anywhere from a CBC, chemistry panel, thyroid test, a simple glucose test, and heartworm tests. So all of these things are possible lab work that we would do on any given day, depending on the need or cause or presentation of that patient.
Good question. Thats fair because chemistry is a broad term. So first off I will tell you this—a lot of different panels are available. When we say a chemistry panel, a chem panel, some people on the human field call it a SMAC, or a SMAC followed by a number. Because different panels offer different parameters. Some of them are larger and may offer 25 to 30 different parameters. Some, like pre-surgical, where we only want to know what the liver, kidney, and maybe a few electrolytes are, things like that might only have 10 or 12 parameters on it. But, to answer your question more specifically, what are those things that were looking for? The big ones that we tend to look for on every sick animal are kidneys and liver.
So what are we looking at? Kidneys have certain markers that can appear on a routine chemistry panel. SDMA, BUN, creatinine, phosphorus. Theres the BUN creatinine ratio that often appears on some panels. That tells me a picture, if you will, of whats going on with that animals kidney function. The liver is another big one. ALT, AST, alkaline phosphatase, bilirubin, and cholesterol can be impacted by the liver, and albumin and globulin are two proteins that are produced by the liver. Sometimes you might have a coagulation factor. So you might want to run a coag test on an animal with impaired liver function because that can affect the clotting factors that need to be present for an animal to clot. So you see where thats going? There area lot. Its virtually impossible to cover every single one in this brief segment, but those are the big primers that we look at.
Chemistries also look at things like your blood glucose, your electrolytes, like sodium, potassium, chloride, and phosphorus. All of these results can be valuable pieces of the puzzle that helps us uncover the underlying disease process in a given patient.
So what does a baseline lab test look like? When we do yearly checkups on animals, when dogs come in and we talk about doing wellness blood work, people kind of give us a funny look. And theyre like, “No doc, my dogs fine. Hes three. Why do I want to do blood work?” But that word, what you just said, baseline, is important. Because what it does is it gives you a chance to see what that animals values look like when they are young, healthy, and are not sick in any way, shape, or form. Thats your baseline, because at some point, maybe its in six months, maybe its in six years, that animal is going to come back to you, and maybe this time hes not feeling so well. The dog could be vomiting or, perhaps, they’re drinking a bunch of water. Pick your disease presentation. The baseline sample that we pulled all those months or years ago now allows us to compare to with this potentially abnormal sample. And it makes it so much easier.
I say, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. This dogs liver was 42 last time. His ALT was 42, and now its 316. Somethings off.” You just know what normal for that dog is, because theres always variation in that. And now you get a much clearer picture of whats happening at a given time. So thats why I like baseline samples.
Early detection with any disease process and any species, dog, cat, bird, human, anything, early detection is huge. Why? Well, for obvious reasons, the earlier you catch it, the better prognosis youre going to have. And why is that? Lets take the kidneys, for example. The kidneys are very finicky. If your kidneys begin failing, for whatever reason, from a toxin to just an old animal whos going into kidney failure. Once the nephrons, which are the functional units in the kidney, are damaged, they dont come back. And a dog can tolerate, theyll do fine until I think its about 70% nephron loss or 70% of the nephrons affected. Dont quote me on 70%, but its close. They can do just fine until they get beyond that point, and then its a very slippery slope afterward. In other words, sometimes they can be too far gone for us to be able to pull them back and really improve their quality of life.
However, if you were to take that same animal and go back in time, months, or maybe even years, to a routine annual checkup when the dog was eight years old, and you noticed that, wait a second, his BUN and SDMA are just slightly elevated. That doesnt mean hes in kidney failure yet. It means that his kidney function might be impaired just a little bit. That is the prime time where you can put him on corrective diets. You can put the dog on various supplements. You can do things that will slow greatly the progression of those failing kidneys. This is much more helpful than in my example, in which you’re catching the issue two years down the road. Maybe that animal doesnt get to that point for five or six years. Maybe they succumb to something else that doesnt even involve the kidneys. Thats where early detection comes in. The sooner you can address a problem, the better potential outcome you can have.
Quite a lot. Laboratory tests in dogs allow us to get information from things or organs, perhaps internally, that we cant otherwise determine from an outward exam. And thats the best way to look at it. Because I can put my hands on a dog, I can look at things, and I can check their color and listen to their heart and do all those kinds of things. But I cant tell you what their liver function is. I cant tell you what their kidney function is. I cant tell you what their blood sugar is. So thats where laboratory tests come in and give us answers that we may not otherwise be able to see from the outside.
The most common things that I do on a day-to-day basis would be things such as heartworm tests, fecal samples or stool samples, maybe urinalysis, and probably almost as common we do things like chemistry panels and CBCs. Those are probably the big five or so types of lab tests run in veterinary clinics day-to-day, numerous times a day. We might have to send off other lab tests, like maybe a test for Cushings disease, like a low dose dex suppression test or an ACTH stim test or thyroid testing. You could pick a disease presentation, and theres probably a specialty test that I can run to give you more information about it. But the ones I listed previously were probably the most common that we use.
Again, what the dog presents for will dictate what we have to do. And not to be repetitive, but on wellness visits, yearly checkups, heartworm tests, stool samples, and maybe even some wellness blood work, which is a CBC chem. Those are the most common. If you bring an animal in that presents for PU/PD, drinking a lot of water, urinating a lot…maybe they’re losing weight or dehydrated, then, no. My focus goes more to diabetes, hyperthyroidism, kidney failure, those kinds of things. So Im much more inclined to get CBC chemistry and urinalysis on those animals. So again, it just depends on what theyre presenting for, how sick they are, what their clinical signs are. All of that is going to dictate what tests we potentially run.
It depends on the veterinarian you use and what test that veterinarian runs. All the things I keep mentioning time and again, CBC chemistry, urinalysis, all of that. Many veterinarians now have those kinds of machines or equipment in-house in their clinic. The average turnaround time is probably 10 minutes for CBC chem and urinalysis. If Im doing fecal and heartworm, its a little less than that. Its probably more like six to eight minutes to have those two back.
If I have to submit a larger test, like an ACTH stim test or thyroid panel or level or a bunch of other things I dont list, I dont have those in-house. So those have to be pulled and sent to an outside laboratory. And depending on what test it is, its either 24 hours to perhaps 48 to 72 hours for some of the longer taking tests. It’s completely variable and depends on what it is and the lab test. But anywhere from minutes for point-of-care diagnostics or a few days for some of the bigger, harder-to-find tests.