guinea pig wasting disease
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Guinea Pig Wasting Disease
Has your guinea pig been acting strange lately? Is he or she drinking more water than usual? Has your guinea pig been losing weight despite eating well? Does your guinea pig still remain active and look relatively happy? If so, you may be concerned that your little friend has wasting disease.
Wasting disease is believed to be one of two conditions – diabetes or kidney failure.
Cause: Diabetes
Diabetes occurs when your guinea pig’s pancreas is unable to manufacture insulin. Withut insulin, the body is forced to burn fat and protein for energy – this is what causes the symptom of weight loss despite eating healthily. Glucose will continue to build up in the body until finally excreted by the kidneys. Increased urination to eliminate glucose (instead of burning naturally as energy) is what leads guinea pigs to need to urinate morre frequently and thus also drink more water.
Diabetes can only be diagnosed through lab tests, so if concerned, please contact your veterinarian. It is useful to note that at this time there are not insulin treatments for diabetic guinea pigs, so if diabetes is diagnosed, treatment is limited to keeping one’s piggy as happy as possible.
Cause: Kidney Failure
Kidneys can lose function over time due to repeated infection, diets with a high phosphorous content or mold, or simply genetic factors. The earliest symptom of kidney problems is muscle wasting. Kidney problems can cause too much protein to be excreted with the guinea pig’s urine. This causes one’s piggy to eat more while continually losing muscle mass and urinating frequently. Overtime the kidneys lose the ability to eliminate waste altogether and poisioning occurs. Unfortunately, once kidney damage occurs, there is nothing that can be done to reverse the process.
Typically wasting disease is mostly seen in older animals – guinea pigs will drink and urinate far more than normal while continually losing weight. Many guinea pigs can live with this condition anywhere from a few months to about a year.
