Understand Your Pet's Hypertension

In simple words hypertension is the abnormalelevation of blood pressure in the blood vessels. The main cause of itis the narrowing down of arteries. But apart from this there can beseveral other reasons too. Hypertensiondoes occur in cats and dogs. There is an underlying cause of most ofthe hypertension problems in cats and dogs. In cats, kidney disease isa major cause while in dogs this cause is less prevalent. Ifyou want to maintain a proper health of your dog it is essential foryou to get him medically examined on a regular basis. And diagnosinghypertension in your pet is very important. But just measurement willnot help, it is required that the blood pressure has been measuredcorrectly. To measure blood pressure ofcats and dogs, an inflatable cuff is used. It is advised that to getthe blood pressure reading accurately, six readings are taken and thefinal result is taken out by calculating the average of them. The firstreading that comes out is usually inaccurate. For measuring bloodpressure in pets, there is a machine that is automatic in nature anddoes not even employ the use of a stethoscope. The cuff of the machineis placed on your pets tail. This is done because you will get the mostaccurate reading on an animals tail. The machine has been namedDINAMAP. For cats also you can use this machine, but there isspecifically a machine designed for them which is known as Doppler. Nowyou must be wondering what is the normal blood pressure of your pet.The blood pressure in cats and dogs generally depends on its breed. Ineffect, the breed factor plays a more important role in case of dogs.Besides this, the age of the animal is also crucial in determining thenormal limits of the blood flow. Just like humans, blood pressure inanimals rises with age. For cats the normal systolic/diastolicpressures are 160/100 mm Hg and for dogs they are 147/83 mm Hg. Inanimals you can measure blood pressure from three different arterial.They are systolic, diastolic and the average mean of both of them. Thefemale dogs have a lower blood pressure than a male dog. Anotherimportant thing that you should know is that like cats and humans, dogsrarely suffer from the disorder of hypertension due to renal failures.