Cooper's Gout

I was reading through some articles in the Exotic Pet Medicine journal and came across one that sounded oddly familiar. It was a case of swollen fingers "digital swellings" in a 2 year old dragon who weight 405g and lived in a 36x18x18'' tank with proper lighting. The photos looks pretty familiar to me and then I saw the x-rays. The patient was Cooper! I double checked the authors and it was put together by Mark Mitchell and his staff at Illinois who treated him. Very interesting to read through the details about his treatment and the background information provided about gout. I have the x-ray photos on my computer but I'd never seen the microscope photo of the urate crystals, he just told me about them at the time.

Here's the article. Definitely worth a read if you want some in depth info about reptile gout and it's treatment. http://www.exoticpetmedicine.com/article/S1557-5063(13)00223-1/fulltext

That's very interesting ! Cooper is famous now and helping Dr.s to understand gout a little better.

Hello!

That is really interesting, how they did a write up on Cooper.
I am sure that is going to help a lot of people. There are not very many true, documented
cases, either.
Thanks for sharing, I know that isn't easy for you.


Tracie

I'm quite happy to see that his case is published so he can help more dragons out. He had a very meaningful life in that regard. I wish there were more thorough case studies like this available to read.