Global guidelines on pet dental care are helpful
I saw two pets with severe dental disease today.
Dobby the ten year old Dachshund had foul smelling breath, and when I inspected his teeth, he had a massive build up of dental tartar, with infected teeth and gums. He’s been booked in to have half a dozen teeth extracted, as well has having the rest of his teeth and gums cleaned up.
Tabs the nine year old cat had a similar problem, with dental decay on top of the other issues. She’s also going to need significant dental interventions under anaesthesia.
The good news is that within a few weeks, both pets are going to have much healthier mouths, they’ll be feeling more comfortable and their breath will once again smell pleasant.
But there’s a good question: if more attention had been paid to looking after their teeth every day at home over the previous years, could the current situation have been avoided?
I’ve often written about pet dental care in this column: it’s probably the most neglected part of the health of most pets. Something like 80% of dogs and cats over the age of three have some degree of dental disease. Yet because it is so easy to ignore pets’ teeth (they are conveniently hidden behind their lips), most people aren’t aware that this is something that they should be paying attention to. And Dobby and Tabs may be the lucky ones: what about all of the dogs and cats whose owners never get around to taking them to the vet, even when their teeth need veterinary intervention?
Even within the veterinary community, pet dentistry has been contentious over the years, with some vets supporting the highest possible level of dental care (including root canal treatments and crowns) while other vets have felt that a far more basic level of simple care is sufficient.
A recent publication has smoothed over many of these differences of opinion. The first set of Global Guidelines for Veterinary Dentistry have just been launched by the World Small Animal Veterinary Association
( WSAVA). The aim is to support veterinarians around the world in improving recognition of dental disease and in providing a higher standard of dental care to patients. In addition to enhancing current standards of veterinary dentistry, the WSAVA hopes that the Guidelines will help to bridge what it perceives as a significant gap in veterinary education globally and to encourage a greater emphasis on dentistry in the veterinary curriculum.
The Guidelines are aimed at vets, with a high level of detail about dental anatomy, physiology and pathology, but pet owners with a serious interest in this area may find some of the information interesting to read. They include 160 pages of A4 typed writing, so they are not for the casual reader.
The Guidelines provide a comprehensive summary of 21st century pet dental care, including detailed descriptions of pets’ dental anatomy, and details of the wide number of specific problems that can go wrong with animal teeth. From broken crowns, to dental decay, to root abscesses, everything is carefully described, along with recommended treatments.
There is one section that should be read by all pet owners: the latest view on dental home care. The new guidelines include ten pages about the pros and cons of the different ways that pet owners can care for their pets’ teeth.
For many years, it has been known that pet dental health can be optimised by having a good home care routine, but the thought of the challenge of brushing their pet’s teeth has put most people off from even trying. So is there any alternative?
The bottom line is clear: effective removal of dental plaque is essential to dental and periodontal health throughout life. The Guidelines describe two effective ways of doing this: active and passive. Active homecare (tooth brushing) is most effective on the front teeth (incisors and the long, pointy canine teeth) while passive homecare (chew based products) are more effective on the back teeth, where chewing occurs.
This is a new position from vets: up till now, the aim was to get everyone brushing all of their pets’ teeth. The new view is that while brushing of the front teeth is ideal ( and it isn’t so difficult, as they are easily reached), it’s sufficient to use good-quality dental chew products for the difficult-to-reach back teeth. To quote the guidelines, “a combination of active and passive home care is best.”
Finally, there’s useful discussion about the best dental chew products to use. It’s important to use products that have been demonstrated to effectively clean the teeth using published, peer-reviewed research which validates a manufacturer’s claims.
Dental chews made from compressed wheat and cellulose, incorporated into treats, as well as rawhide chews, have good evidence for efficacy, as do some special dental-cleaning pet diets. Plain baked biscuit treats and chew toys (e.g. string and rope toys) have not been shown to clean the teeth effectively, while tooth fractures are a risk for very hard dental treats such as antlers, hooves, or raw bones.
To read the WSAVA global guidelines on pet dental care as a free download, visit http://www.wsava.org/guidelines/ global-dental-guidelines.