Description

The growth phase is fundamental to the lifelong health and wellbeing in all humans. A growth pattern that deviates from optimal, can result from malnutrition or the presence of an underlying developmental disorder. Further, overly rapid growth or catch-up growth are known to predispose the childhood obesity, which is itself a risk factor for lifelong obesity. Outcomes of weight management are often disappointing with many animals either failing to reach target weight, or regaining weight subsequently. Given the poor success of weight management, the veterinary profession should arguably consider focusing on prevention of obesity and, for this, ensuring a healthy growth pattern could be key.
Growth standards, such as those created and promoted by the World Health Organisation are now a vital component of the human paediatric tool kit, allowing trained health professionals to gauge the growth pattern of individual children by comparison with a healthy reference population. Evidence-based growth standards have now been developed for puppies and kittens, which have huge potential for the veterinary profession. Such a tool could facilitate proactive intervention by veterinary professionals, with the aim of promoting optimal husbandry and nutrition practices, identifying and correcting abnormal growth patterns and, ultimately, preventing the development of disease. Growth charts could help veterinary professionals raise awareness about ‘healthy’ body weight, and ensure that more dogs are in optimal body condition on entering early adulthood. This should in turn help to promote the maintenance of a healthy weight for life, through continued regular weight monitoring to ensure that the early-adult body weight is then maintained throughout life.
Talk outline
• What is healthy growth and why is it important?
• Use of growth standards for monitoring the development of children
• Development and validation of growth standards for companion animals
• Practical use of growth standards for monitoring the development of puppies and kittens

Learning Objectives

• Define healthy growth and describe the physiological and pathological factors associated with it.
• Explain the key characteristics of a growth chart and use such charts to analyse growth patterns in kittens.
• Analyse patterns of growth in puppies and kittens and use this information to identify individuals with possible problems.