High Potassium During Anesthesia Causes Sudden Death

[Victor]

I just read the following on greytarticles:

 

While it is rare, greyhounds are the only breed that has been observed to have an unexplained increase in potassium level while anesthetized, especially after being under for about 1.5 – 2 hrs. In both Bailey’s case and the case last week, they discovered an extremely elevated level of potassium even though the level was normal just before the procedure.

They gave calcium to counteract it in both cases, but were unable to reverse it in Bailey’s case. In the case last week, they had enough warning with heart rate gradually slowing that they ran a test and discovered it in time to reverse it; in Bailey’s case it was too sudden for the treatment to work (they only even tried it because of the incident the week before).

This apparently has been observed in only greyhounds (rarely) but the mechanism of what is happening is not understood. My vet has decided that they are now going to start doing istat tests for electrolytes at one hour in and every half hour after that during a procedure whenever they have a greyhound anesthetized in order to try to catch this phenomenon early and reverse it before it causes a cardiac incident.

http://greytarticles.wordpress.com/medical-first-aid/anesthesia-surgical/high-potassium-during-anesthesia-causes-greyhound-sudden-death/

 

This may be worth mentioning or asking about before your greyhound has a procedure that requires anesthesia.

[tbhounds]

I would like to see the studies that support this.

[BauersMom]

My vet had taken a blood sample mid-neuter to rerun a test for one of our foster dogs (I think they were rerunning the 4DX or something like that?) and the dog went into cardiac arrest and died. They ran the blood work after to see if anything was amiss and the potassium levels were way high. He called Dr. Couto and discussed it with him, not sure what came of that though. It happened very fast, they were just lucky to have a blood sample from right before he crashed.

 

The pre-surgery blood work was fine, potassium normal.

[Time4ANap]

This has been discussed a little bit already in this thread. http://forum.greytalk.com/index.php/topic/305245-mason-has-a-dental-and-possible-tooth-extraction-tomorrow/