Well, thank you very much everyone for tuning in. In this session, what I want to do is give you a deep dive into how to monitor, what I call healthy growth. In both kittens and puppies.
And really, I guess the basis for putting this presentation together is that, monitoring health growth is a critical tool for promoting lifelong health in dogs and cats. It's something I guess we've always known is important. A good start in life is critical for the future.
We now have some very useful and usable tools for you. To use actually in your, in, in your practises, which will really help facilitate this process. So I'm hoping that at the end of this talk you'll be equipped with both the knowledge but also some of the tools, hopefully to do a better job.
So what we're gonna do during this session is we're gonna focus on 3 areas, there'll be 3 parts. We'll start by defining what we mean by healthy growth and explaining to you why it's an important concept. Having done that, I'm gonna talk you through the critical tool, that there is.
You may be familiar already with this, you may be not. But we do now have some accurate and evidence-based growth charts, both for kittens and puppies, and that is gonna be not surprisingly, one of the critical tools. So I'll talk you through how they were developed, but the science behind them, if you like.
And then in the final part, I'm gonna take much more of a practical approach, and I'm gonna demonstrate with some examples, real life examples, the practical use of those charts and how they kind of complement other monitoring approaches. So Let's get straight on. Part one.
What is healthy growth and why is it important? I guess whenever I give a talk, I always like to start with a definition. So partly so I know what the subject is and I can communicate that clearly to anyone who happens to be watching or listening.
And I usually just go kind of searching for something on the internet, but sadly here. The internet let me down. I couldn't find a good definition for the term healthy growth either in people or in cats or dogs.
So I kind of had to make one up. And I hope you like this. I was quite proud of it, when it, came about.
So this here is my definition for healthy growth. I would call it a pattern of growth, which is associated with optimal development. And of course, the intention is to ensure that that animal has the best opportunity for living a long and healthy life by implication without disease.
Now of course in that second part, we can't provide any guarantees. All we can do of course is, is give them the best chance. And so I guess that's what our purpose, make sure they grow in the right way at the right rate to have the best chance of being healthy long term.
There are various factors that it is known are associated with healthy growth, and many of these, the veterinary professional can influence. So let's just go through some of the, the factors er involved. First and foremost, it's important that we provide appropriate nutrition for this kitten or puppy.
It has to be appropriate for the life stage, so recognise that they are growing. Appropriate for the species as well, and in the right amounts, so. Two aspects here.
Firstly, we need to ensure we're feeding a diet with an optimal balance of essential nutrients, amino acids, vitamins, minerals, essential fatty acids. And there are various, textbooks and guides and, and recommendations on that. This one here in this little icon is the National Research Council recommendations, where, where the exact amounts of each nutrient for growth are stipulated, .
So you can certainly do that probably from a practical perspective, both for an owner and er for a veterinary professional. If you ensure you feed a dart that is complete and balanced and appropriate for the life stage, that's probably the best way of doing it. But of course it's not just getting the right nutrient and recipe, it's ensuring that you're feeding the correct amounts.
Not too little, so that the growth is poor and they're stunted, not too much. And if anything, the consequences of overfeeding and growth are more concerning than underfeeding. So appropriate nutrition, first factor of importance.
What else? Well, it's important that there's good intestinal health. The intestinal system, the gastrointestinal tract needs to develop and mature.
And therefore, I guess our job as veterinary professionals is to ensure that there aren't too many challenges whilst perhaps the system is slightly vulnerable. So a good aspect, of course, of health during the growth phase will be adequate parasite control using endoparasite medications. Such as fenbendazole and so on and so forth, to eliminate both, worms, round worms, tapeworms, etc.
But also other endoparasites such as this little one here, Giardia. They can have profound effects in young individuals whilst that immune intestine is still developing. So important that we respect intestinal health.
Third and related to that is immune health. But again, the immune system is immature at birth and needs to develop. So of course, appropriate nutrition will help with that.
Guarding against, some of those, I guess more nasty infections, that can particularly affect the immune system is another aspect. And of course the third thing we can do is ensure that we are protecting against infectious diseases that can be life threatening, such as parvovirus. So ensuring that we give the right courses of vaccinations at the right times, all important and ensures a good immune health.
So all of those variers we can influence. The next one is a little bit more of a challenge for us as vets, because healthy growth relies on having the right balance, of hormones. In the early phases of growth, having, growth hormone at the right amounts and thyroid hormone is critical, and we'll all be aware of dwarfism cases where these are lacking.
So we can do a little about that other than spotting, those individuals that are affected and hopefully rectifying that as early as possible. More importantly is, in later growth, the influence of sex hormones. These tend to affect after puberty, around and after puberty in children.
Same is true for cats and dogs. And of course I think the issue here is. That many owners wish to have their animals neutered, and this is frequently done during the growth phase.
And of course there are debates about the timing of neutering. Now, both neutering and timing, because it's gonna affect the availability of sex hormones is potentially gonna affect healthy growth. And I'll say a little bit about that.
There's actually a greater effect during growth in kittens than. Than in than in puppies, but the effect can be there in both species. So I'm just gonna show you a little bit of work to demonstrate this effect.
This was work done where, kittens were, some kittens that so, so basically there was a comparison made between some kittens that were neutered at about 19 weeks of age, and kittens that remained sexually intact. And both the change in food intake and weight was compared. So this here is food intake, and we're looking at neutered cats relative to sexually intact cats.
So the, the sort of intake of the sexually intact cats is kind of horizontal on this graph. And what we can see after neutering, you get this spike of food intake that increases, although it does tend to go back towards baseline subsequently. The impact of that is that kittens that are neutered, unless you control their food intake, they will actually gain weight.
You'll see actually they gain weight and it and it then kind of continues even longer term, even despite the fact that the, the food intake seems to go back to more normal levels. So this is, is a clear indication that neutering changes food intake and therefore leads to extra weight gain. Well of course we don't know when we just look at body weight is, is that weight because the kitten is becoming larger, it's skeleton and it's muscles and all the other tissues are enlarging in proportion.
Baker. Or Is it, because actually they, it's inappropriate growth, i.e.
They're putting on body fat, they're becoming fatter, despite the same sort of skeletal size. And that has actually been explored further in some, some other work. This is now looking at body composition.
So we have lean mass in blue, fat mass in red, and we're comparing again the sexually intact kittens. With neutered kittens again neutered at age 19 weeks, and here we have two time points where we've measured composition at 10 weeks and 52 weeks. And what I think you can see if you just visualise this graph is that the bulk of the gaining tissue in neutered individuals is actually fat mass.
So it would imply that if you do not control food intake, these kittens will gain fat, they'll become fatter. So that means. We have to take seriously potential effects of changes in sex hormones during neutron.
OK, so that's a little bit about some of the factors involved and it's giving us some, some strategies already for how we ensure growth. But of course in in order for us to to judge success, we have to be able to assess growth patterns to know whether or not an individual is growing at an appropriate rate. It can be quite difficult, particularly as a vet if we're only seeing individuals on occasion.
So how do we assess healthy growth? I'll say a little bit about children first, and that will help us kind of set the scene for er puppies and kittens. So there are various means of assessing healthy growth in children.
You can assess so called linear growth. So obviously from a baby that's their length, and then from a toddler onwards when they're standing it would be their height. That's telling you pretty much about stature.
You can look at the weight relative to age, so that's telling you both about stature and again body fat mass. And you can also look at weight relative to size. An example of a measurement there would be body mass index.
So you're actually looking at fat it effectively distribution relative to, to the size of the individual. So those are the measures that are available for children and for health professionals. And generally, as we'll, we'll, we'll we'll see more in a moment, these are monitored using so-called growth standards.
A growth standard is essentially giving you an indication of what normal, ie healthy growth is. So it will be a standard for what a nor a healthy child or healthy children, how, how they would grow. So the purpose of using those standards, of course, is hopefully to identify a child is growing appropriately.
If not, the health professional might be able to identify those that are stunted and also possibly spot individuals that might be growing too rapidly, cos again as we'll see, that itself has consequences. As is always the case in the veterinary world, we are far less developed in terms of monitoring growth in our puppies and kittens. In fact, we've had very few ways of being able to do it until only recently.
However, we now, like children, can actually, we do now have growth standards so we can look to make sure that puppies and kittens are an appropriate weight for their age. We of course do have body condition scores and whilst they've not been properly validated in kittens and puppies, they are reasonable. So we can still make use of these in conjunction with growth standards.
And once again, our purpose will be to identify. Individuals that might be growing poorly, if we spot poor growth, that's an indication to go looking for the reason, you know, could it be a pituitary dwarf, for example, or something else? OK.
But also again to spot those that might be growing too rapidly, that might imply that that individual is going to develop some problems either during growth or later on. And then of course a final complexity that we have that we can, can, again, again, kind of solve a little bit with monitoring growth is to look at the impact of neuting as I've mentioned already. So we can take that into account if we if we undertake growth monitoring.
OK. So what sorts of conditions might we see? Let's imagine we've been monitoring the growth of a of a dog or a cat, and we find that in fact, they're not growing as quickly as expected.
This would alert me to want to run some tests to look for possible reasons. We mentioned this already, but we'd maybe want to be running endocrine tests to look for possible pituitary dwarfism, where there's a deficiency of growth hormone. We might want to run a, a thyroxine measurement to see if there's evidence of congenital hypothyroidism.
Both of these will lead to stunting. What else if signs were appropriate? Could there be a portosystemic shunt?
So imaging and bile acids might help in an investigation. And then the final thing it would be worth doing is exploring what diet the individual has been fed. If they've been fed an inappropriate diet, they could, they could be at risk of nutritional hyperparathyroidism, that can lead to stunting as well as other orthopaedic abnormalities.
So if you see stunting, you need, it prompts you to kind of check the diet and potentially perform some further investigations. What happens if you see rapid growth? Well, here, there aren't really diseases as such or there there's no real common diseases that would cause rapid growth.
It's more if we are if a, if a puppy is growing too rapidly, maybe because it's being overfed, it puts it at risk of developing other diseases. So the priority is, is slightly different. Examples of course for diseases associated with rapid growth would include the developmental orthopaedic diseases, particularly osteochondrosis, ununited aineal process, OCD, that kind of thing.
So the intention would be that we prevent that if we can alter the growth pattern. As if not more important, I may be showing my bias here, but I would say obesity is certainly far more common problem, and as I will show you. There is evidence that rapid growth and growth patterns in general can actually be associated and therefore possibly like might be predisposing to the development of obesity.
On that note, this has been widely shown in multiple species. So there's some very good evidence in, in children that growth patterns are associated with future obesity. This was a large cohort study here where they looked at different patterns of growth, and they actually found that, that, rapid growth and in fact even the body weight at just 18 months of life predicted a child developing obesity by the age of 7.
Why is developing obesity by 7 important? Well, it's a sad fact that children who've developed obesity. Are highly likely to have obesity for the rest of their life.
So sadly, if they're at risk early on, that's a pattern that could potentially be be set for, for good for the future. OK. So this is where growth pattern monitoring is really, really important.
We've got similar evidence in both dogs and cats that rapid growth is associated with obesity. In the interests of time, I'm really just gonna focus on the cat data. In this study, we actually looked at a colony of cats, and the, and the reason we did that is that we had essentially body weight measurements, regular measurements from this cohort of cats over a period of about 9 years from, from essentially sort of vaccination time through to about sort of 89 years of age.
They were cats that lived a charmed life. These were cats that, that basically undertook palatability tests. So they had tasty foods and they could choose what they ate and effectively were eating ad libitum for the bulk of that time.
And what we found when we explored the data was that there were two sets of cats here. So there was one set of cats that essentially from adulthood. Their body weight maintained steady, didn't change despite them being offered at food ad lib.
On the other hand, there was another bunch of cats where they kind of gained weight gradually through life and at some point during life became overweight. So we kind of had cats that developed obesity. During adulthood and those in ideal weight.
And when we looked back and traced changes in weight during growth, we found that there was no difference at about 3 months of age. But those that then effectively developed overweight later grew more rapidly. So that's a bit similar to that previous study in humans.
It's a, this is a cohort study that kind of shows rapid growth essentially being associated with the development of future obesity. So something I think, from a clinical point of view, we need to be paying attention to. So let's just summarise this first part of the talk.
Remember we first started by talking about the definition of healthy growth, and this is a pattern which is associated with optimal development with the intention to being maximising the chances of having lifelong health. Remember the factors involved in healthy growth, ensuring optimal nutrition. Ensuring you've got intestinal and immune health and of course protecting against, life threatening diseases as well as vaccinating.
And remember that hormone balance is important. You need to spot individuals not growing and look for possible causes. Equally, bear in mind the impact that neutering during growth might have on development.
And remember that growth disorders that come in two types. You've got those that lead to stunting. That typically prompts you to investigate.
Others may lead to rapid growth and here, if anything, the priority is to correct it because of the risk of those other conditions from developing. In that first part we did briefly introduce the topic of growth standards or growth charts. I want now to do much more of a deep dive into some of the science behind them.
And interestingly, my interest in this topic didn't come from the veterinary field. It actually came from the time I became a parent. So this, these are my two daughters.
This is Abigail on the top and Ophelia, at the bottom. They're a little bit older than this now, so they wouldn't thank me for showing, this particular picture. But essentially when you first become a parent, those of you who have become parents will know this.
You do get a little bit of information to leave the hospital with. You get this thing, which is, what, what's called the dread the red book, or some would call it the dreaded red book. It has some useful information in there and useful ways in which you can see how your child is developing.
Within these pages, if you look, you have one of these. So yes, this is a growth standard or a growth chart. It's a pink one, this is actually one for a girl, and this is the growth chart of my younger daughter, Ophelia.
And what you, what the, what you can see is we've got a, a series of lines. These are called centile lines, and we've made some entries on here with these little dots. The intention is, as a parent, you go and see your health professional once in a while, and they weigh your child using some accurate scales, and they can keep an idea about how they are developing.
So that was really, I guess, my first foray into growth monitoring. So let's say a little bit more about what a growth chart is. A growth chart depicts typical patterns of growth in healthy children.
And I should say again that that the term growth standard is used when the data that generated the chart is from children that are healthy. You can use there, there, there are other types of charts, . Which aren't growth standards, but are growth references, and that could just be from a population where they've not checked if children are healthy.
That, that's OK, but it's not as good as using data from only healthy individuals. OK. So if you use that and have a standard.
That enables a health professional to monitor how that child is developing against what would be expected, what would be typical. And again, as I've said earlier, the intention is you confirm that the pattern of growth is normal, they're growing well, or if, if growth seems to be deviating from what's expected, all it does is tell the health professional to have a closer look. There are many occasions where it's nothing to worry about, it may just be that individual and individual variation.
But the key point with the standard is all it is doing is flagging the need to just have a bit of a closer look. There are various standards and references that have been available over the years. Nowadays, the vast majority of used in the human field are those of the World Health organisation.
These were standards developed, from 6 international centres, so 6 different countries across the world. It was from healthy children. They were children born to mothers who breastfed, non-smoking, and those children were healthy during their development.
So again, it's pretty much the best guess we've got for for what healthy growth looks like. How does the chart develop? So, you notice, remember you've got these lines on the chart, but how do you create those lines?
Well, what you actually have to do is take huge numbers of measurements, weight or height or whatever it is, from children at different ages of development. You can then use quite fancy mathematical modelling that I don't fully understand in order to join points of similarity. And joining these lines and they're then smoothed through various processes, gives you these so-called centa lines, and the name of the centaur line refers to the percentage of children who fall below that line at any point in time.
So a 50th centile means that 50% of the children are lighter or or under that measurement. 2nd centile 2% under the measurement, 98th centile 98%, so on and so forth. It's important to to note that there isn't a normal centile.
Healthy growth can be anywhere within these boundaries. And individuals are gonna vary in stature. So it may well be that one will map a a lower centile, another child might an upper centile.
The key point is the trajectory should effectively be parallel to the lines give or take. So you notice here Ophelia didn't do too badly. She, she mapped along the 50th centile, in her case.
So that's children we have now done a similar thing both for puppies and also now kittens. And this has been some very rewarding work I was very grateful to be involved in. It was a collaboration between 5 different centres.
So we had the Waltham Centre, Royal Cannon, Banfield, and for those of you who don't know, Banfield is a network of over 700 veterinary hospitals across North America. Huge numbers of dogs and cats registered there, and that was where we were able to source data for you for generation of the charts. And of course we've got University of Liverpool where I work, and, University College London.
They are world renowned experts in child growth monitoring, so they were a useful contact for this project. So, we started by developing the puppy charts. We took 20 million weight records from 4 million dogs and from this we were able to identify individuals that we felt were healthy and had grown healthily.
So these individuals had no illness in the 1st 3 years of life. They remained in ideal body condition for that full 3 years and were otherwise no other issues of concern. We then used same mathematics as the, as for the World Health organisation charts to develop those centile lines.
Now creating lines for charts for puppies is more of a challenge than for for kids, partly because there's a much greater range of shape and size across different breeds. And initially we were looking at could we develop charts for each individual breed. Problem with that, we've got some common breeds and we've got rare breeds, and there wouldn't be enough data for the rarer breeds, so that would limit their utility.
It wouldn't allow you to monitor a mixed breed dog either. And it would be problematic for, for, for sort of a, a vet professional. They'd have to keep hundreds of different charts for each different breed and, and, and that can present a bit of complexity.
So instead, we, we actually looked at, developing groups of charts. And eventually came up with charts for different size categories. So we actually ended up having 5 different size categories, for a range of weights up to about 40 kg.
This is the expected adult weight. And when we looked at growth in different breeds, we found for the most part, breeds within these different categories grew in a similar way. So in fact actually it was perfectly appropriate to to use these size categories based on adult weight rather.
Than individual breeds. The exceptions, sadly are the giant breed dogs. You notice this goes up to 40 kg.
Over that, the different breeds do different things. So a a newfound them grows differently from a from a Great Dane and, and so on. So there's still some work to do in order to generate some specific charts for them.
Secondition we talked about was neutering. Now of course we looked only at healthy individuals that were in ideal weight, so we didn't look at overweight dogs, and in this group, neutering didn't have a great effect on growth. Early neutering led to a slight upwards jump.
Later neuting a slight downwards jump, but it was well within the, the, the boundaries of one centile line, so it didn't really take mean a difference. It means that basically the same charts are appropriate both for intact and neutered animals whenever they're neutered. So the upshot basically is a total of 10 charts, that's male and female for the different size categories.
After developing the charts, we then validated them, so we looked at, various illnesses, leading to sort of stunting growth and those associated with, with, with overgrowth, and we also looked at. Dogs that were reported to be overweight or have obesity or underweight in their records, so we, we then compared their growth with that of the charts. And I'll just show you these data here, but what you can see is those that are underweight for each of the five size categories, that their, their kind of growth tends to sort of tail off and drop.
This is the, this is kind of their growth relative to the standards, which are these horizontal lines. And then if you look at overweight and and obese dogs in each category, these tend to grow too quickly, crossing centiles upwards. So that tended to help confirm that the the charts were kind of valid for, for monitoring purposes.
Briefly, we've done a similar thing for for kittens. Er so far we've got ones which are appropriate for domestic short hair and therefore medium and long hair as well. We still need to look at how pedigree breeds grow in relation to this, but that'll probably be less of an issue than dogs cos there isn't so much a a range of size.
So so far we've got male and female kitten charts that are available. One difference, and I kind of highlighted it earlier on talking about neutering, is that nutriing does have a greater impact, and it's so, therefore something we need to be aware of. And also the timing of neuring is important, and that is shown in these charts here.
What we're looking at is, is essentially again, growth of neutered individuals relative to those left sexually intact. And the vertical lines here indicate the timing of neutering. OK, and we've got male and female on left and right.
And what I'm showing you is the difference between late neutering after 7 months at the bottom and early neutering under 5 months. You can see, I think for yourself that the impact, if you, if you neuter early, if you're a practise that neuters early, there is a greater potential for the effect on, on, on growth and that of course is gonna mean body fat deposition, and it's particularly pronounced for female kittens. I'm not saying don't neuter early, there are various reasons for making that decision.
If you do, it is then your responsibility as a vet professional to ensure that they don't grow inappropriately. If you use the growth charts, you can ensure that their food intake is appropriate during that phase to minimise the potential impact of nutrient. And then finally we've also done some, some work looking at sort of overweight versus underweight and similar things seen, so underweight, cats seem to grow quickly, slower, particularly early on, and, and they kind of rebound a bit.
It might be adjustments that are being made in this time, whereas those that are sort of overweight tend to grow too quickly and cross centiles upwards. So, just to summarise this, this part, . The phenomenon of growth chart monitoring is is well established, particularly in children across around and around the world.
And remember it's the World Health organisation charts that we now use predominantly. We now have similar charts that vet professionals can use for puppies and kittens. Same sort of science has gone into them.
And of course it's early days, and this is a, this is a, a statement of, of, of hope rather than absolute fact at the moment. But I do, and I hopefully show you how, I believe that these have great potential for, for monitoring and ensuring good health in the in the early stages of, of life, and will give those puppies and kittens, you know, a a a a a good start for the future. So let's now just kind of finish up in this last part by looking at the practical use of growth charts.
I've showed you some of the publications that we've got 33 publications already so far and more coming along the line. If anybody's interested in seeing the science, they can feel free to contact me and I can, I can share those papers, they're all open access. But really what's more useful for, for vet professionals is to actually have a tool that you can use in practise.
And there are now resources available, that you can use free of charge in your veterinary practise. You can use them from, from this afternoon if you wish. So one way of accessing them is to go to the Waltham website.
There's a, a link at the bottom here. And this website has a range of resources, including the charts themselves, you can download as PDF plus lots of instructions and so on and so forth. Easiest thing rather than copying the link is if you, if you use a search engine like Google or similar, just put Waltham growth charts in and you should find those.
If your practise is a royal canon practise, you can speak to your Royal Canyon, adviser, and, again, it's not a plug, it's just to say that you can get hold of the charts free that way as well. They have a vet portal where you can download them, but if you're not a, a Royal Canning practise, don't worry the the the charts are available, through the Waltham, site. So different ways of getting them, they're the same charts, they just kind of the the design just looks slightly different.
So, little, a few opening thoughts here. What are the charts? What aren't they?
What can they do, what can't they do? So first and foremost, you need to think of these as a tool for monitoring growth, OK? They're not a diagnostic test, it's not gonna give you a yes no answer, an absolute.
It is far more nuanced than that, and it requires interpretation. OK. So just think of it as a tool to help you, OK.
So what they can do is help you to confirm to the owner and concern to yourself that the pattern of growth is normal. If there is a deviation from growth, it's just giving you a a a a a a nudge as it were, just to have a look and check what's happening. And there may be nothing to worry about, but it's just saying, just have a look at this one, OK?
And of course using the chart is a great way of facilitating conversations about health in general. So as well as looking, talking about nutrition and how they're developing, you can, To you know, then use this as a as a as a springboard for other health measures like parasite control and and so on and so forth, OK. They're not perfect, OK?
You won't spot every problem with that, OK, you'll spot many but not all of them. I can't guarantee individuals will be healthy and whilst I'd love to be able to cure obesity if we use these charts and keep animals lean, I can't guarantee that either. But they're pretty good and they're better than we've had up until now.
How do you use the chart? Well, it depends on firstly whether it's it's a kitten or it's a puppy. If it's a kitten, you've just got the two charts, male and female to choose from.
If it's a, a, a puppy, you kind of need to know what the expected adult weight is. That's easy if it's a, if it's a particular breed. If it's a crossbred, you kind of have to use your judgement.
So if you know the breeds involved, it's gonna be somewhere in between. Have a guess is the best thing and start with one chart. If, if the numbers look wrong, it might just be that you're on the wrong chart because your, your initial guess was wrong.
So there are ways of, of sort of correcting, it's not the end of the world. So you choose your chart. In this example, we've got the female kitten chart, OK.
Next we need to calculate the age in weeks. So you can do that if you know the date of birth and today's date. And you can easily online, there are little online tools to work out the age in in weeks of, of an individual.
OK? So you know the age, weigh the animal on some calibrated scales, ideally use the same ones if you can throughout. And congratulations, you can now plot the first point on your chart.
This will give you a rough idea about where that individual is within the population, but it's actually repeat measures that are most useful, OK? And the recommendation as a minimum would be to have monthly measurements till about 6 months and then kind of every 3 months afterwards. What I would say though is that the beauty of the charts is you can take any number of measurements at any time.
It doesn't have to be an exact individuals intervals, it could be any time. And I've found the more I've used them, frequent monitoring gives you more precise information. The more you measure, the much more precise and accurate you can be with the information.
So it's repeat measurements are important because that enables you then to assess growth patterns. Is the individual growing healthily, Following the, the lines as in this example, is it growing too quickly where it might start deviating and crossing centiles upwards, or too slowly crossing centiles downwards? You always just take this as a nudge, you interpret it alongside the health of the individual and their body condition, cos it might actually be that there's nothing to worry about, but it's just telling you to have a quick a a look.
So what sorts of patterns of growth might we expect? Healthy individuals would be expected to follow the centile lines more or less. Usually they'll stay within one centile line, either side, but they can sometimes bounce around and some bounce around more than others.
Examples here's this one following much more closely, this one bouncing around a bit. OK. But that's generally what healthy growth would look like.
Generally speaking, if growth deviates, you kind of get alerts for two reasons. Firstly, if you were to record a weight which is above or below all lines on the chart, that would be an extreme weight for that particular category, that particular size. So it's something just to keep an eye on because they shouldn't be outside the, the ranges, generally speaking.
The other thing would be if the growth is faster or slower, especially if you cross two centile lines, although even crossing less than that, you might want to make make changes. So this is a an individual that grows too slowly and is crossing sentences downwards. These two have have grown too quickly, you'll note that they've, we've we've recorded some weights above the upper centile here and they've crossed centiles as well.
So if you see things where patterns are deviating, first things first, check the health of the individual, check its body condition. One question you might want to ask for dogs is, am I on the right chart? Again, as I said, sometimes you're not sure which chart is right, and it might be you've kind of picked the wrong one of two, particularly if their adult weight is in between sizes.
So in that situation, just try plotting on the the other chart, and it might be that it makes more sense. OK. So just check you've got the right chart.
If you're happy you're on the right chart. Then if they're growing too slowly, think about, do I need to investigate? Is there a concern?
Check on nutrition, check on you know, possible tests and things. If they're growing too quickly, then I might want to think about adjusting the food intake and monitoring more closely to try to avoid the risk of other illnesses. So that's the principle, and we'll just kind of finish up in the last few minutes.
I wanna show some some examples for you, and these are real life examples. And I'm gonna start with this little beautiful schnauzer puppy called Yoyo. It happens to me, one of my docs, so I'm a little bit biassed, you can imagine.
And what I did actually with Yo Yo was I, I've used the chart on a, and, and measured on a weekly basis, and I took photographs of this chart, this paper chart, as it developed. You, so you'll see it becoming more tatty as the, as the, as, as the, as, as, as the days go on. So this is our early, early sort of monitoring, as you can see.
And she's kind of following somewhere between 91st and 75th centile. And she continues this way. And we actually neutered her about 6 months of age.
So this is her actually just after she returned from her her ovarian hysterectomy. And of course, normally this would be a time if you haven't been monitoring regularly to, to maybe up the frequency of rela of of measurements. And for her it was fine.
There was a little bit of jiggling around, as you can see, and we made a slight adjustment to food intake, but she kind of stayed on track as you can see. However, life has always throws up challenges. She went through a period where she had sort of repeated episodes of vomiting as you can see.
And if you kind of check the chart, you, you see that this did have a slight impact on her growth, but as she recovered, the the the the the the pattern should regain. So typically a dog would kind of re regain their former trajectory after illnesses like that are recovered. And then, so we were able to sort of follow her through.
And she kind of, you know, bounced around a little bit, but got to, adult weight at sort of somewhere between 6 and 6.5 kg, where she has remained. And this is her at, when she's adulthood, at adult, early adulthood, and you can see, I would say she's got a perfect body shape.
Example two, similar sort of example, but some, some other useful pointers here is Jamie. And Jamie was a, a flat coat retriever puppy, and again we did regular monitoring. I kind of put these on PowerPoint here, so it's a little bit, the, a little bit easier to see.
But in the first stages, first sort of 6 months, once again, weekly monitoring, and she, she, she kind of grew perfectly. I can't remember when she was new, I think she was neutered a little bit later on. But at this point, she develops acute diarrhoea, and you'll notice actually, even though it's subtle, there was a very slight drop in her, her weight.
Recovered quickly at that point. And regained her normal trajectory, but then suffered a further bout where she had Giardia. And you'll see here it actually led to quite a profound sudden drop in in weight but once we treated that again.
She recovered . And we did a little bit too good a job, as it were, of, of, of restoring her weight. And she actually kind of got to a point where she was near, then above her trajectory.
And again, the beauty of the chart is you can see this and make adjustments. So we were able to kind of just slower growth slightly and bring her back on track. And that's where she sort of stayed for the rest of her, her, her, her growth phase.
So you can kind of see here, and it's a nice way of monitoring these, these hiccups in the road. And one further example this time, a, a, a, a kitten, this is Hagrid. And again, similar sort of approach taken here.
And similarly, the early phases were good. He was early neutered. So again, particularly, and he's a male kitten, obviously with a female kitten in particular I don't want to watch very closely.
And again, we were able to ensure we kept him on track through adjustments. But life always throws up challenges. One thing I would just want to, to show you here is that one thing you can do with the charts is you can get a rough idea as to the expected adult weight if you kind of trace the, the centile that they're on forward.
So, you know, early on, we can be pretty confident, he should be ending up around sort of 4.5 kg. Now the owners went on holiday at this point and into kennels and actually you'll see for yourselves the little jump that happened just for being in kennels for a week.
So at this point, you know, kind of, it, it's not too bad, but actually he's perhaps starting to be, he may end up being heavier than expected as a result of that trip. He also got lower urinary tract disease at this point, so the diet was changed to a lower urinary diet. And if you know about anything about those, they're very high fat, and you'll see straight away that led to again, once again another jump in his growth.
So again, if we don't intervene, the risk will be he'll end up near the sort of nearest 6 kg, and that's definitely wrong for him. So again, with the beauty of monitoring and seeing these alterations, we were able to control his intake and actually although we took less a common. Measurements, it actually brought him straight back on track to where we'd want him to be.
OK, so once again another example of how you can tailor what you're doing, particularly food wise, to to the needs. And again, he ended his growth phase in a perfect shape. So, just, one more thing to, to mention.
I, I kind of sort of touched upon that already. You can kind of predict adult weight. Using the charts as I've said, but the other thing that it's worth doing is when they get to their adult weight and you're happy they're they're they they're in good condition with a body condition score, that basically provides you with what I would call their healthy adult weight.
This is their the a weight which it would be good for them to maintain for the rest of their life. OK, so this, as I say, it's this healthy adult weight. So generally what I would do is recommend.
Recording that weight in the clinical records and using it then as a base moving forward. So if you're regularly weighing them every annual vaccination or other times, if they deviate more than about 5% from that adult weight, that for me would be a way of inter intervening and and adjusting. So, to be honest, although we've talked about growth monitoring here, it feeds then in very well to a sort of a future prevention programme, because it gives you this accurate healthy weight, er to aim to achieve.
I think that's it, we're out of time. I hope that's been useful for you. I hope you've found that a nice, merging of both science and also prac practical tips as well.
So key points, remember we've got growth charts, and these are growth standards are available for puppies and kittens, OK, cos they, they reflect the growth of healthy pet individuals. I hope I've demonstrated how easy they are to use and how well they can flag possible issues for you. As I say, they can also be used kind of to kickstart some sort of lifelong programme if that's what you wanna do for your practise.
And I kind of alluded to this, I haven't said too much about it, but by regularly monitoring and having those interactions with the client, it'll help to build up that relationship with them. And if, as as well as talking about growth and nutrition, you can use those consultations to talk about other aspects of early life care from parasite control, you know, obviously ensuring vaccination, behavioural issues and things that might arise at that time. So it's a very good way of actually ensuring those other aspects of ensuring healthy growth can be handled as well as just looking at the monitoring.
So we're out of time, thank you very much for listening.