My female GSD had a urinalysis done the other day. The vet said she had crystals in her urine and wants to have her abdomen x-rayed. Anyone every have something like this before?

Sounds like your girl is pissing jewelry, you're sitting on a goldmine!

Came accross this a while when looking up UTI's, maybe has some relevance to you?

http://pet.justanswer.com/questions/xqw-causes-dog-urine-crystals-treatment

Kevin, FYI - we had a similar situation with our last rott. Our first indication of a problem was noticing it was taking him longer to urinate and his stream appeared to be a lot less then normal. We took him to our vet and they were in the process of scheduling more tests at another location when the next day the poor dog was completely blocked and it became necessary to perform emergency surgery.

The stones were removed and sent to the lab for a “Crystallographic Composition”, the result were no “Nidus” observed and the stones were composed of 100% “Cystine”. I can’t locate all of my paperwork but basically these stones were grouping together inside the dog and creating a blockage when they got too large for him to pass. After 3 major surgeries over a period of 4 yrs, we finally got a surgeon that decided to neuter the dog and created a larger opening for his urine to pass. A two inch opening was made where his testicle had been so the urine could pass through the larger opening and not enter the urethra at all.

For my dog this clearly was an extreme case costing us thousands of dollars and if that last procedure had been performed on his second surgery we would have saved us lot’s of money and saved the dog from having to go though any more surgery.

I don’t know what the crystals your dog is passing are made up of, but wanted to post this in case you run into the same problem we did. Although we were not able to stop the stones from forming, a solution was finally reached so the dog was able to pass the larger stones and not have to endure any more surgeries. I do have a picture of these stones, but don’t have a scanner in able to post them for you to see.

Good Luck,

Connie sent me the link to this site for this very problem:

http://www.peteducation.com/article.cfm?cls=2&cat=1634&articleid=400

It gives a pretty good overview.

My dog got her abdomen x-rayed and there were no problems. The vet did recommend the Hills prescription diet but I'm skeptical of that. I used to feed raw with this dog, do you think if I went back to raw that may solve this problem? I really don't want to do the prescription diet.

More info:

"No problems" means no stones?

What did the urine culture show? Did the vet give the dog an antibiotic?

Which type of crystals is it?

Has the dog had chronic UTIs?

What were the symptoms that triggered the urinalysis?

No problems mean no stones and no bladder infection.

The vet did give an antibiotic but I don't understand why since there was no infection.

I can't recall the type of crystals, I'll have to look.

No UTI'S in the past.

The symptoms were that my dog had urinated 3 times inside the house in a 6 hour period. She’s been an inside dog for 6 years and has never done this. She has been an outside dog for the past several months and this is the first time she was inside for any length of time.