CLINICAL PATHOLOGY
The Clinical Utility of
Specific Canine Pancreatic Lipase
(Spec cPL™)
Dr Remo Lobetti
BVSc MMedVet(Med), ECVIM(CA)
Bryanston Veterinary Hospital,
011 706 6023
Pancreatitis is a relatively common disease with very
non-specific clinical signs such as abdominal pain,
anorexia, vomiting and diarrhoea. Currently there is
no very specific and sensitive test available to use as
a gold standard for diagnosis. Pancreatitis may present as acute and fulminant or be more low grade
and chronic in nature. These forms will present with
different clinical signs and also cause a different degree of cell damage and resultant lipase release by
the affected organ, depending on the degree of inflammation, amount of fibrosis and number of cells
remaining and affected.
In a case series of canine random consecutive post
mortems the most common pancreatic lesion was
hyperplastic nodules (80.2%), followed by lymphocytic inflammation (52.5%), fibrosis (49.5%), atrophy
(46.5%), neutrophilic inflammation (31.7%), pancreatic
fat necrosis (25.7%), pancreatic necrosis (16.8%), and
oedema (9.9%). The most common lesion, lymphocytic inflammation, was mild in most cases. This could
Dr Liesel van der Merwe
BVSc (Hons) MMedVet (Med)
Small Animals.)
help explain why histologic lesions may be more prevalent than clinical signs of pancreatic disease.5
Clinically normal dogs have low circulating concentrations of pancreatic lipase in the blood. On the other
hand, dogs with acute pancreatitis typically show dramatic elevations in serum pancreatic lipase concentrations, which remain elevated for a prolonged period. Animals with low-grade, histopathological disease
may not show any dramatic elevations in serum lipase
and may even exhibit no clinical signs.5 Pancreatitic
lipase can be determined by either the spec cPL or
SNAP cPL test. The former is a laboratory run test,