Six Year Old Daschund -- Rolo -- cushings--(Passed away 17 August 2012)

[Bgoods]

Our dog Rolo was recently diagnosed with Cushings Disease. Rolo is a purebred Mini Wirehaired Daschund.



This started back in the summer when we noticed that he had begun to drink and urinate a lot. We took him into our vet and after blood testing and an ultrasound concluded he has Cushings.

An interesting point in this is that we had a sr. wellness blood panel done on him in May, and there were no glaring abnormalities showing then. In July, we noticed the onset of symptoms and a followup panel led our vet down the road of Cushings. She always cautioned that while he was displaying some of the signs/symptoms (to include the pot-bellied look) he was not displaying all of the symptoms. She then proceeded to order the ultrasound and then a panel that was supposed to be the definitive test for Cushings. Based on those results, we began a regime of 10mg 2x daily of Vetaryl.

Since then we eventually upped his dose to 15 mg 2x daily, however, after a few weeks, he developed pancreatitis and we withheld the vetaryl while treating the pancreatitis. After getting him over the pancreatitis, we resumed the vetaryl (doing 10mg 1 x daily and 15mg 1x daily). However, after about 2 weeks, he begin to exhibit lethargy and extreme dullness (understood as a possible side-effect of the Vetaryl). We again withheld the Vetaryl since the only remaining sympton of the Cushings was the pot-bellied. After about 2 weeks off of the Vetaryl, the heaving drinking and the urinating began, feeling we were again headed for dehydration, we resumed the Vetaryl at 10mg 2x daily. We finally stabilized his drinking and urinating again and decided we would leave him on that dosage until early 2011 then have his Cortisol levels tested.

One of the concerns our vet expressed after the pancreatitis is that his "liver levels" remained elevated, something not seen before the pancreatits.

Last night, he appeared extremely dull and listless and would simply lay in his bed not reacting to us at all. For the first time, he refused food. We called our vet at 7:30 pm and she met us at her office. She examined him and he was exhibiting symptoms of a respiratory infection -- swollen lymph nodes in the throat, wheezy sounds by stethoscope (although you could also detect them by putting your ear to his back and listening). No fever, but she decided to treat as respiratory, however without steroids.

After the pancreatitis and because of the elevated liver levels still showing up, our vet prescribed Amoxicillin and he took his last does on the December 20. She told us the Amoxicillin is not really as effective in treating the respiratory and may have only suppressed the respiratory infection and when Amoxicillin was terminated, it finally allowed the RI to more completely exhibit.

I asked my vet for all of Rolo's blood work, I need to swing by and pick it up. She did give me the blood work from last night. I noticed in some other threads, that some of the levels of interest are:

(Numbers in Parens () are from 6 December testing)
bilirubin -- TBIL - 0.4 mg/dL [no Ref Range] --(0.4)
creatinine -- 0.5 mg/dL [with a Ref Range of 0.5 - 1.8] --(0.4)
creatine kinase -- I don't see it on the blood report
albumin -- 3.0 g/dl [with a Ref Range of 2.3 - 4.0]-- (3.2)

A few other out of range readings:

ALT 679 U/L [Ref Range10-100] (673)
ALKP 716 U/L [Ref Range of 23-212] -- (433)
GGT 300 U/L [Ref Range of 0 - 7] -- (166)

AMYL 460 U/L [Ref Range of 500 - 1500] -- (No previous)
CHOL >520 mg/dL [Ref Range of 110-320] -- (>520)
EOS 0.1 u/L [Ref Range of .1 - 1.49] -- (.22)