Science / Medicine : Human Medicine Now Benefits Animals : Veterinarians: Techniques developed for humans are now commonly used to heal ailing animals. Applications include kidney dialysis and organ transplants.

Last spring, Abracadabra, a 3-day-old foal with kidney failure, was rushed to the equine neonatal intensive care unit at UC Davis Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital. His condition worsened in the next few hours, as the antibiotics that veterinarian Sally Vivrette gave him had no effect.

“Are you a gambler?” she asked the foal’s owner, Michael Hastings. The only solution remaining to Abracadabra, she explained, was risky: hooking him up to a dialysis machine once used to treat humans with chronic kidney disease. It had never been tried on a foal.

Dialysis, developed by doing research on dogs and goats for application in humans, has over the last several years come full circle to benefit animals. Vivrette sought out UC Davis veterinarian Larry Cowgill, a pioneer in using the procedure on cats and dogs suffering from acute kidney failure. She proposed that he add horses to the list.

Cowgill agreed, as did Hastings. Abracadabra was anesthetized and a surgical team installed a shunt to divert the blood entering the foal’s kidneys into the dialysis machine, which removes waste products the kidneys ordinarily transform into urine. Over the next five days, Abracadabra was hooked up to the machine for three six-hour sessions.

The process worked. The dialysis gave the foal’s kidneys a chance to rest, fend off the infection with the help of the antibiotics and repair themselves. A few days later, the surgeons removed the shunt.

Today, Hastings said, Abracadabra, is “doing stupendously. He’s fully recovered and growing like a weed.” He has only one holdover from the days he spent at the neonatal unit: He likes to lie down and cradle his head in Hastings’ lap, as he did with the veterinarians while he was sick.

“He was spoiled rotten when he was here,” Cowgill said.

Many animals now benefit from procedures commonly used on humans. Dogs have hips and knees replaced. Horses have arthroscopy to remove bone chips around tendons. Cats have kidney transplants. Dogs receive heart pacemakers. Chemotherapy is done on animals, as are human emergency room techniques.

The experiences of physicians dealing with premature and sick human babies have been transferred to neonatal intensive care units in veterinary schools and zoos. The tiny panda cub that recently died at the National Zoo was cared for in an intensive care unit, and physicians from Children’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., were consulted. Non-invasive procedures--ultrasound, CAT scans, echo-cardiography and nuclear magnetic resonance--developed and refined in humans are now used by veterinarians.

“A lot of research on animals directly benefits animals,” says Anne Koterba, assistant professor at the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Florida in Gainesville, and director of the school’s equine neonatal intensive care unit.

One startling example is a discovery UC Davis veterinarian Paul Pion made while doing research on tissue plasminogen activator--TPA--used to dissolve blood clots that cause heart attacks in humans. One cat on which he tested TPA to dissolve its blood clots had a heart disease called dilated cardiomyopathy.

“His heart was a big, flabby muscle,” Pion said. “It was a very common disease, and cats who got it would routinely die.” At that time, veterinarians thought that cats suffered from the disease because they were not fed correctly by their owners. But the owner of this cat knew he had a nutritional deficiency, because the cat’s veterinarian had found lesions in its eyes, which indicated a lack of taurine, an essential amino acid for cats.

“We started to investigate the relationship between the two,” Pion said. He found that the taurine deficiency caused the disease. Pet food manufacturers, who thought they had enough taurine in their products, have added more since August, 1987. Since then, Pion said, the disease has decreased dramatically. “In one fell swoop I prevented disease in more animals than I could in a lifetime of treating animals individually,” Pion said.

One of the most interesting applications of human medicine to veterinary medicine are the dozen equine neonatal units that have sprung up around the country since the first one was founded at the University of Florida in 1982. “We didn’t know much about foals,” said Koterba, who now handles 45 to 55 foals a year. “We treated them like adult (horses), and it didn’t work well.”

Like human babies, baby horses differ physiologically from adults, and require different treatment--so much so that when UC Davis veterinarian John Madigan wanted to set up an equine neonatal intensive care unit, he talked to Boyd Goetzman. The professor of pediatrics and chief of the division of neonatology at UC Davis Medical Center had written a how-to manual for neonatal intensive care units for human babies; he helped Madigan write a similar manual for foals.

There is no doubt that economics drives the transfer of medical technology from humans to animals, Koterba said. “In the late 1970s, prices of thoroughbred horses went skyrocketing. Sick foals were hitting the ground with hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in them. To just let them die was not a very good idea,” she said.

The economic value attached to zoo animals, farm animals, endangered species and research animals has justified money spent to care for them.

But economics is not always the motivation behind a human wanting to keep an animal alive. Last year, Karen Ustin, a nightclub owner from Danville, Calif., spent $1,500 for a kidney transplant for her cat, Cyrano, an ordinary gray and white short-haired cat that had lived with her for 12 years. The immunosuppressant drugs that prevent rejection of transplanted organs were developed by doing research on dogs.

Because the drugs are relatively inexpensive, and now in good supply because of their use on humans, a kidney transplant was done for Cyrano. His post-surgical treatment was determined by the experience accumulated on humans, said UC Davis veterinarian Clare Gregory, who performed the transplant. “How I follow the progress of cats is based on work done on people in the last 20 years,” he said.

Cyrano died last month of intestinal cancer, a year after receiving his new kidney. The cat’s last year of life was like his other 12, Ustin said, except that he had to take pills twice a day. “That extra year, he had good quality of life,” said Ustin, who has no regrets about doing the transplant. “I couldn’t just watch him suffer.”

Abracadabra, although he will likely be trained in dressage, exhibition riding, will not produce any income for Hastings, who earns his living in real estate. But future income was never the reason he spent $3,000 on the dialysis treatment, he said. “I have a very strong feeling that if you bring an animal into the world, that it is your responsibility.”