Encyclopedia of Canine Veterinary Medical Information

Liver shunt

Liver shunts are a congenital problem in some dogs. During gestation the placenta delivers blood with food and oxygen from the mother through the umbilical vein. This means that in the fetus, circulation is the reverse of circulation after birth, because the fetus' veins have the oxygenated blood and arteries return unoxygentated blood to the heart. In order to make this work, there is a shunt from the liver venous circulation to the arterial circulation. At birth, the pressure within the circulatory system changes as respiration occurs and this shuts the shunt, which eventually disappears. If this reverse in circulation doesn't happen for some reason, the liver is deprived of a blood supply and doesn't develop properly after birth. Many puppies can live with the small functioning portion of the liver for some time but eventually have problems and usually die if the situation is uncorrected. It is possible to surgically close the shunt and the surgery works well. I can remember hearing of one sheltie that was 6 years of age (or possibly older) before a congenital liver shunt was recognized, so some dogs can live a long time with this problem.

Back

Last edited 01/13/08

vetinfo | vetinfo4cats | vetinfo4dogs | Canine Encyclopedia | Feline Encyclopedia | purpose
| Links |Dr Mike's Blog

The entire content of the vetinfo.com, vetinfo4dogs.com and vetinfo4cats.com website is and has been authored by Dr Michael Richards who is a veterinarian. Except for index type pages and comments interspersed though the site written by Michal Justis, who isn't ...we pretty much marked the difference.

Please do not use our site to attempt to diagnose or treat your pet. Your veterinarian is the best source of health advice for an individual pet. Please do use our site to become better informed about the medical problems your pet may have. We will do our best to ensure that information presented is accurate and up-to-date. The most current information will be at the top of each page. Remember that veterinarians often disagree about the best treatments for pets. There are often several perfectly acceptable ways to treat the same condition. Just ask a lot of questions!

Comments or information about our website, feedback, art info, broken links,
spelling or other errors or help finding things on the site or anything else-

e-mail
Michal Justis

E-mail for www. vetinfo.com is answered by Michal Justis, who is not a veterinarian
(but is a Lady).
Please remember that if you want a reply, make sure your e-mail return address is correct and if you have e-mail spam blocking,
that you have set it to receive e-mail from vetinfo.
Please do not send e-mail attachments. We are unable to open them due to security risks.

We use return email addresses to answer the mail we receive and for no other purpose. We do not share these addresses with outside parties for any reason.

Please note: The information on our site is for everyone to read.
Please use it as often as you like.

Please use the search engines or one of the indexes to
access the information you need on our website.

All original artwork as well as text on our vetinfo websites is copyrighted to Tiercom©1996-2008