@Maldoror, I’m glad your boy is okay, sounds like you are keeping a close eye on him, which is good.
By way of education for other folks who may read this thread, in a bloated stomach, gas and/or food stretches the stomach to many times its normal size, which tremendous abdominal pain. For reasons we in the veterinary community don’t fully understand, this distended stomach tends to rotate, twisting off not only its own blood supply but the only exit routes for the gas inside it.
The spleen, which normally sits along the greater curvature of the stomach, can twist as well, which cuts off its circulation. The distended stomach becomes so large that it compresses the major veins that run along the back and return the body's blood to the heart—this creates circulatory shock, where the body doesn’t have enough blood volume to sustain all its functions.
Not only is this collection of physiologic disasters extremely painful, it is also rapidly life-threatening. A dog with a bloated, twisted stomach (more scientifically called “gastric dilitation and vovulus” as you mentioned) will die in pain in a matter of hours unless drastic steps are taken.
The most common thing you will see in a bloated dog is that they are distressed and make multiple attempts to vomit without any result. The upper abdomen is hard and distended from the gas within it—sometimes you can feel it, and it is incredibly painful for the dog.
Middle aged to older dogs are definitely at an increased risk—there’s at least ten different factors that we think go into “risk of GDV” and it’s hard to single out any one of them more than others.
Classically, our Great Danes are the #1 culprit, though any dog can bloat, even a chihuahua! #2 are Saint Bernards.
Your doggo is at an increased risk for any of these reasons:
- Increasing age
- Having closely related family members with a history of bloat
- Eating rapidly
- Feeding from an elevated bowl
- Feeding a dry food with fat or oil listed in the first four ingredients.
Stuff you can do to decrease the bloat risk, sounds like you’ve made a few of these changes already:
- Adding table scraps, canned food, or non-kibble supplements to your boy’s kibble diet reduced the risk of bloat in some studies. More research is needed to fully understand the implications of this, so this is a tentative recommendation.
- Feeding a dry food containing a calcium-rich meat meal (such as meat/lamb meal, fish meal, chicken by-product meal, meat meal, or bone meal) listed in the first four ingredients of the ingredient list.
- Eating two or more meals per day
Contrary to popular belief, cereal ingredients such as soy, wheat, or corn in the first four ingredients of the ingredient list do not increase the risk of bloat—we have zero empirical evidence or data that this is the case.
The only way to prevent the stomach actually twisting it’s way around is an elective surgery, as
@whenwolves mentioned. We attach a portion of the stomach to the abdominal wall to reduce the risk, and it generally works quite well. The stomach can still bloat and be painful and uncomfortable, but it can’t twist nearly as easily. The percents are around a 75% recurrence of GDV without gastropexy vs 6% or so with. If your boy is one of the high risk GDV breeds, this surgery makes sense.
You may also choose to simply watch him carefully, having made all the dietary changes you mentioned, and that’s appropriate as well. The surgery decreases the risk, but ultimately is elective, in my opinion, you aren’t making a bad choice for your boys health by not doing it—it would come down to how much peace of mind you had, and multiple other factors to influence your decision.
