- Hi, my name's Matt Gosbell.
I'm part owner here
of the Melbourne Bird Veterinary Hospital.
We're one of only two bird-only clinics in Australia.
I've got what we call a membership in avian medicine
and I'm also presently doing a residency
to become a registered bird specialist here in Australia.
So this is Morgi.
Morgi is a long-term client of mine.
She's nearly about 40
and she's suffered from many different sort of diseases
over a lifetime, but most of the problems
that she's suffering from at the moment
stem from a long-term fatty died when she was younger.
Fortunately, that diet has changed.
But what it's done is it's caused fatty liver disease.
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The diet has been changed quite late in her life,
so that's resulted in an ongoing system of problems.
So it's now causing problems with her heart
and it's caused other problems considering her weight.
She's got arthritis problems and other things as well.
Fatty liver disease
we see a lot of in these species of birds.
So the Australian species especially,
but all species of birds that are fed high-fat diets.
So long that they're being fed these high-fat diets,
what happens is the fat goes into the liver.
The liver can't process that.
When it's too much fat,
the liver just stores more and more and more fat.
And eventually, it stores so much fat
that the liver stops working properly.
My usual term for it is a pate liver.
So this is how they make pate with ducks.
They feed them very high fat diets and they get pate.
So the same thing happens with our birds,
our pet parrots and things.
A liver that feels and looks like pate
is not going to be a liver
that's gonna be functioning very well.
So a buildup of fat on the liver
eventually means the liver doesn't function properly.
So when you get a liver that's not functioning very well,
you get a reduction in things
like the proteins that they use for clotting.
So what we sometimes find is we find little bruises
and clots out in their beaks in particular.
We get problems with overgrown beaks.
You often see it with very poor feathering.
So you get poor quality feathering.
Along with fatty liver disease,
especially in these types of parrots,
you'll often get fat depositing up around the skin
and you'll get fatty lumps.
As I said, poor feathering often leads to plucking
and sometimes we'll get plucking
around the area where the liver is.
So the liver we're poking out underneath the chest,
just here.
If you've got some liver damage
from fatty liver disease and it's causing some pain
and discomfort to the bird,
you'll find that they'll often pluck
around in this area as well and that's quite common as well.
So a lot of our pet birds,
especially birds that are fed mainly a seed-based diet
often become quite overweight and obese.
And this can be a huge problem because as we talked about
with the fatty liver disease, the fat needs to go somewhere
and it's stored somewhere on the body.
The more fat that they have on their diet,
the higher the cholesterol and that will also lead
to things like arthrosclerosis as well.
So that will affect the heart.
Birds that are overweight and not being exercised
and are not on good nutrition.
So Morgi here, as a result of a fatty liver disease,
is also on a number of other medications
secondary to the fatty liver disease.
So the fatty liver disease has led on to heart disease.
Being overweight has led on to arthritis issues.
And as a result, she's on numerous medications
for each of those different problems.
Fatty liver disease is a slow insidious disease
as a result of a lifetime of fat.
Morgi's very fortunate.
She's now 40 years of age.
Normally birds such as her that are on a seed diet
are lucky to live past their twenties.
So we see a lot of galahs dying at a far too younger age
and a lot of cockies and other species
simply because of being fed the wrong diet
and they are getting worse and worse
with their health over time
and they're just not coping with the disease deficiencies
and excess fat that's in their diet.
I did have a client once who had a cockatiel
that was on a fatty diet
and ended up with fatty liver disease.
This bird was so sick
that simply a slight change in the diet
resulted in this bird dying within five days.
So what happened with this bird,
the owner ran out of the regular seeds.
She didn't manage to wean this bird off
of the seed diet completely so what we ended up doing
is getting as best quality seed as possible.
She ran out of a seed and decided
she'd just tied the bird over 'til she did get some new seed
by getting some supermarket seed.
And within five days, the bird was dead.
This is not a nice disease.
It's a slow, insidious disease.
You don't notice it when it starts.
You just start seeing a bird that's fat,
becomes less mobile.
You might find some changes in the droppings,
but even that is not in the early stages.
What happens is it happens over years
and if it's caught early enough, it can be reversed.
The liver is very, very forgiving
and does have the ability to regenerate.
But unlike Morgi, the unlucky thing with Morgi
is that the liver and the damage that had been caused,
there's some degree of it that's been irreversible
and it's led on to all these other secondary problems
such as a heart problems.
But it can be very difficult to give some of these guys
the multiple medications they need
in order to maintain a quality of life.
The best way to prevent dietary-related fatty liver disease
is obviously, to give diets low in fat.
Giving correct diets and good exercise
is what it's all about, just like for us.
It's our responsibility,
the birds don't go out and get their own food.
We get it for them.
So it's our responsibility to make sure
we're feeding out birds correctly.
The seeds that we traditionally buy at the supermarkets
and the pet shops, these are not the seeds
that these guys naturally eat in the wild.
So these are diets that we've made
from seeds that are very high in fats,
very low in essential vitamins and minerals
that we're feeding our birds.
And yes, they can survive for a period of time.
But over that time,
they develop a whole lot of nutritional deficiencies,
as well as excess fat-related diseases.
Some of the different ways in which we monitor
and manage fatty liver disease
is through regular routine blood tests.
What we see on the blood test is we can read
how the liver is functioning and managing.
We can also read the cholesterol levels.
So they're the key things that I monitor for Morgi.
And because her disease is so severe
and because she does come and go with signs of sickness,
we're actually monitoring this and tracking this
on a six monthly basis.
So we can see if a cholesterol goes up,
we can see if her liver factors go up.
She hasn't had normal factors since I've been managing her.
We've been managing this disease for 10 years
and we're just basically stabilizing it
and stopping it from getting worse,
but we haven't been able to reverse
any of the disease completely.
So diagnosis of disease can be done a number of ways.
Firstly, we take blood tests
and often we do x-rays as well to help us understand
what's going on.
So the blood test tells us
how the organs are functioning internally,
but an x-ray can tell us if there's swelling or enlargements
where that enlargement's coming from
and help us cue into what might be going on.
With diseases like fatty liver disease,
you will get very general liver changes
and indications of liver failure on the blood tests.
And you'll get things like swelling on the exercise.
But we might need to extend even further
and take biopsies from the liver.
And that can be really important
'cause there can be a number of things
that will cause swelling of the liver,
as well as some changes in the blood.
And that could mean some type of cancer as well.
So therefore, it is important to actually get a confirmation
of diagnosis of exactly what's causing the liver failure.
Whether it's directly related to diet issues,
like as fatty liver, which is very common,
or whether we've got something like a liver cancer going on.
Birds with fatty liver disease
are a high risk under anesthetic.
Because we need a functioning liver
to allow for good recovery and to minimize the risk
that the anesthetic will lead to toxic side effects.
So often what we do with these birds before we do
any kind of surgery is we try to address the fatty liver
and the diet issues as much as possible.
If we can do that, they'll have a better functioning liver
and there'll be a lower anesthetic risk.
They're often at high risk of bleeding as well
'cause the liver produces the clotting factors
that the blood requires to minimize bleeding disorders.
And so if we can fix that and reduce that,
then that makes them a lower risk.
We often find when we do that too,
the lumps reduce in size and become a more simple surgery.
They never completely go away once they're formed, however.
It does become a more emergency case
and sometimes we have to take risks
if the lump has been so big
that it's ulcerating and bleeding
because we don't want the bird to bleed to death
or have issues simply because we've left the lump there.
So it becomes a little bit of a dilemma
if people have left these lumps for too long
and not really understood what's going on.
Okay, so this is Morgi's x-rays.
And on Morgi's x-rays, we can tell
we've actually got a very large heart.
You can see the heart shadow here.
This is a lot larger than what the heart should be
in these species of bird.
We can also very, very clearly see the major blood vessels
off here, and they look a little bit large as well.
And that's a common concern that we've got, arteriosclerosis
which is thickening of those arteries.
So very similar to what happens in people
and it affects the blood flow.
So that can cause a very serious blockage
of flow of blood around the body.
We've also got here quite a filling area.
So with the heart here,
the liver sits in this area here,
and this is quite large, this liver.
We can't quite see all the outlines,
but I know that the liver's sitting here
because it should sit just below the stomach.
And this here is part of the stomach
with all these little bits and grease inside there.
So that's been pushed out a position,
that's been pushed in this direction
and it's been pushed back from where it should sit.
And the only thing that's gonna do that
is a very large liver sitting here.
So I can tell that this liver is very large on this x-ray
without actually seeing the full outline.
We should have a black area here
indicating where the air sacs are.
So that's also an indication that the liver's pushing
tissue this way as well.
So this is an x-ray here of a very similar species of bird.
And we can see here we've got much more
black area here where the lung capacity is,
and you can see much more clearly hourglass
sort of appearance that's occurring.
So this is the heart at the top
and this is the liver over the intestinal tract.
And certainly we can see this gizzard here
which has all the girt,
the part of the stomach with the grit
is sitting over the hip area where it should be sitting.
The interesting thing here is we can see
a microchip here.
So this little line here is the x-ray of the microchip.
This here is what we call the lateral view.
So the lateral view is when the bird is lying on its side.
The other view was when the bird was lying on its back.
So that's the two views
help us get a three dimensional feel for what's going on.
Again, we can see the heart sitting here
and you can compare to the last bird that we saw.
Very similar species.
You see the heart is so much smaller
and you can't really see the full edge of the heart,
but we can see it just here.
And the liver is sitting just in here,
so much, much smaller.
We're actually seen a bit of gap here.
We're seeing that's where the air sac is sitting,
whereas the previous bird, it was all filled.
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