welcome back well if your dog can't get enough to drink and seems to need to go outside all the time it must be diabetes right not so fast there's an even more common condition that could be the problem our pet vet Dr David Visser is here this morning to talk about a health condition called Cushing's disease right you got kush disease good morning good morning yeah Cushing's disease is actually the most common hormonal condition in pets but it's not the most commonly diagnosed and we'll talk abo
ut the challenges with that but this is not a rare condition and many times like you said increased thirst can be our first clue okay so you mentioned that this is our hormone problem uh which hormone is it what actually goes wrong with this particular hormone yeah there's a hormone in the body called cortisol and like most things you're supposed to have a certain amount you can't have too much you can't have too little so this is an overproduction having too much cortisol and cortisol is produc
ed by the adrenal gland in the body adrenal means close to the kidneys we have two of them just like we have two kidneys and they are very small small glands but they create this hormone but it is controlled by the management of the body which is at the pituitary gland kind of at the base of the brain and it sends messages like uh the boss is sending a message down to the factory to make this stuff it is considered the stress hormone so it's involved in protective mechanisms in the body when the
body is under uh stress and duress but Cushing's disease is having too much of that hormone and while it's a seems like a good thing to have some increase in cortisol like during stresses and such this is too much of a good thing and that's when it causes some issues and problems okay so what kind of problems other than constantly have to take your dog in and out and constantly refilling the water bowl what other kind of problems does Cushing disease cause well Cushing's um when you have too mu
ch cortisol it's like being on cortisone okay so having too much of it is a is a problem so people who take cortisone know that there's a plus and a minus of doing so but you don't have a choice when you have too much cortisol production in your body it can affect many different aspects of your internal health it can um shut down the other hormone systems by uh what we call negative feedback when you have too much of one thing it says oh I guess we got to shut things down and so it it it creates
some changes there but it can also affect the immune system lowering the effectiveness of the immune system I see that I got two Graphics of or two lines of the same but the the second line is actually about suppressing the immune system because cortisol and cortisone can reduce the effectiveness of the immune system but too much of that hormone can also create stress for internal organs liver stress liver failure can be an effect of having Cushings go under managed or untreated but it also wea
kens all muscles of the body and including the heart some pets will have sort of a distended abdomen not so much because they're overweight but because they don't have enough muscle tone to kind of keep things up and tucked and of course if this is unchecked and it is not managed this can be a fatal condition because of the way that it can affect so many different systems in the body that's what I'm thinking because I'm like this is a huge difference in diabetes when we sat down I said oh this j
ust sounds like diabetes most people would just think oh diabetes and oh my goodness okay okay so what should dog owners be looking out for um some of the signs actually do relate to changes in thirst and urination so pets that have this condition may have an increase in thirst drinking lots of water finding novel sources of water in the body or in the environment so that they can drink and then also they have to get rid of all of this uh this water um and that comes in the form of increased uri
ne production as I described sometimes they have this um weight gain appearance it does stimulate appetite but sometimes the weakness in the muscles just make them look overweight and their skin is kind of puffy in that regard sometimes too sometimes there's overall poor skin Health maybe even hair loss not itchy hair loss like we see with allergies but non- itchy hair loss so those can be some Clues as well but many times when it suppresses the immune system uh then you get opportunistic infect
ions or things your immune system normally would have fought off but as I mention all of these different signs it's important to realize that not all of those signs will be present it could be that one sign is present could be that another it even can be a silent condition that is only found by doing some tests routinely that's that silent part is is scary um okay so are there blood tests to diagnose this condition and how does how does that work so if uh like in our in our Hospital we've done a
heartworm test that combines with internal organ functions uh evaluated at the same time and there's one liver indicator on that organ function test that gives us a clue that there might be too much cortisol in the body I won't go into detail except that test kind of says hey you better look over here when we do then a cortisol test to figure out if Cushings is actually the cause of that elevated liver enzyme or the signs at home are supportive of that then we do a Cushings test basically corti
sol changes throughout the day and if you just take a single sample for cortisol you're going to find a great variation so instead we have this combination where we give a medicine that c causes cortisol to change later in the day then we check and see whether it did and if it did uh change predictably then everything's okay but if it did Stay High Cushings so it's not really Cushings posi Cushings negative but looking for the tests that point in that direction okay and uh treatment treatment fo
r this because of course the fact that it can be fatal is a scary thing for a pet owner to hear exactly so um like I said there's many different controls in the body but the main thing is that the factory the adrenal glands are making too much there are medications now that can actually hold back the production of cortisol now back in the day it used to involve remove surgical removal of the adrenal glands or medication that was almost in the chemotherapy category to destroy parts of the uh adre
nal gland now there's a medication that can be used and it's used in two phases the first one is that we need to get that cortisol down to where it should be and then we need to figure out how to maintain the levels so once we start this medicine which is much safer than older methods like I said then we test to make sure we've lowered it enough and then we adjust the dose to make sure that we can stay on that even even Keel and that then restores normaly to the body normaly to the hormone syste
m and normaly to life expectancy okay so a good prognosis then if this is treated and and monitored yes the key is to find it and that's why we have to look for the signs at home and I encourage folks when they're having a heartworm test make sure it's bundled with something that tells us about internal organ functions not just for that but overall evaluation of internal health it never hurts to ask never hurts at all abely well thank you so much Dr V really great information if you want to cont
act the pet V Dr David viser you can reach at the center for Animal Health by calling 888 pets vets or always shoot them an email you can do that too map petvet comcast.net and we'll be right back
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