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Me and my wife have been trying very hard to find something to help our 11 year old American Bulldog, Nikki. She has arthritis, and it has been getting progressively worse. With all the cold damp weather the last month, Nikki is just flat out crippled. Her front shoulder already had been given her issues, and now her hip is very stiff on one side.
We have tried several things. We have her on a very high quality joint support formula. We have tried adequan injections which seemed to help a little at first, but not much and then she began getting worse. Then we tried rimadyl, which did almost nothing for her. Now we have been trying prevacox, and it seems to be doing nothing as well. In the past we had given her a short run of prednisone, and it was VERY effective. She was energetic, happy, and getting along fine with a very light limp. We had a bit left over and the vet had said that if she got really bad we could use it again for a 7 day cycle. So we did, and again, she was doing terrific.
So what we are beginning to wonder, and we will definitely discuss it with our vet, is if a small daily dose of prednisone be a good treatment for her?
I am just wondering if anyone here has used prednisone long term for their pets and what the result was.
We are trying our best to get Nikki feeling better, and really only want the best for her. We also realize she is old though. We want our best to make the quality of her remaining days as good as possible. We don't want to take any unnecessary risks, but at this point, not taking risks means she is bed ridden and will just decline until we have to put her under. She is not happy at all right now because she loves to go the park and walk around and sniff 30 minutes every morning. The last couple of weeks, she has not done that. She just walks a few steps and then stares at me wanting to get back in the truck.
My dog Ben has a whole in his heart and is on 7 different meds. Prednisone is one of them. At first he took one twice a day then backed off to once a day. I started noticing that he was loosing hair which the vet said was a side effect. We backed him off to once every other day and now it's just twice a week. He is a very unusual case so I don't know if this is any help to you.
With Nikki, we have noticed that when we do a 7 day treatment where we start at 40mg and cycle down to 5mg on the final day, she does pretty good. Our hope is that a low dosage of 1-5mg a day would be sufficient to keep her feeling good enough to get up and walk around.
Well, I can tell you about the effects of long-term prednisone from a human standpoint and I would guess that many of the problems with pred. that humans encounter would be shared by dogs, too. And perhaps they'd be worse. I have Lupus and WISH I could take pred. all of the time because it makes makes me function almost as though I'm not disabled. But the long-term effects (by longterm, I mean taking it consistently for more than a month) are devastating.
Long-term use of prednisone causes diabetes and all of its complications, osteoporosis and osteomalacia (a softening of the bones) that makes the bones very thin and susceptible to being fractured easily. It also causes dramatic weight gain, which invariably puts more pressure on the joints. I have used prednisone for only VERY brief periods of symptom control, no more than two weeks at a time maybe three times a year, and I have developed severe osteoporosis, despite the fact that I'm only 44 years old and take the osteoporosis meds.
The problem with prednisone is that the body quickly becomes dependent on it and this dependency causes the adrenal (and other) glands to stop functioning. That's when the problems start. Pred. is GREAT for short-term relief or a respite from disease because it makes you feel wonderful and it can take down problematic inflammation fast. But staying on pred. can drastically shorten one's lifespan and create all sorts of problems. Another big one is that you can tend to overdo and push yourself to the point of injury because pred. takes away the body's own warning system (pain and fatigue) when you've done too much.
As I said, this is from a human standpoint but I'm pretty confident that at least some of it applies to dosing animals with prednisone, too. Since animals are smaller, they may be even more susceptible to the long-term effects.
We used prednisone the wonder drug when my 11 year old shih tzu had terminal cancer. It worked wonders for one month. She was like super dog. Problem is, the cancer dr told me, the cancer outsmarts the prednisone and takes over which is what happened. With all her problems and her age, I would give her whatever made her and you happy. Talk with your vet. I was using 5 mg, she was 13 lbs.
We had an english bulldog on metacam which worked well for him for a couple of years. He had pretty bad arthritis also. He was about 10 when we started him on it and wasn't real concerned about side effects as he was up there in age and comfort was more important, metacam can be hard on the liver. By the time he was 12 he was really bad off and the med stop working. Unfortunately we had him PTS.
At your dogs age I don't know that I would worry about the side effects so much, if it works then it is worth it to make him pain free as much as possible.
My little senior mutt, Kona, has been on Prednisone for almost two years. He's now 13. He has cutaneous lupus, which causes running sores on his mouth and other mucus membranes (privates) if he doesn't take it. He's down to 5mg every other day. Less, and the sores return. I do think the Pred has thinned his coat and made him vulnerable to cold. I give him a flaxseed capsule every day, which seems to have helped the coat and dry skin.
There's really no choice, so I don't worry about side effects. The lupus is awful, so I'd have to have him PTS if he couldn't get relief.
It's so hard watching them get old, isn't it? Especially with Kona, since I got him as a puppy.
Thanks for all of the input. It is so hard watching Nikki age. I got her when she was 5 weeks old and I was at the time a very troubled young man of 22 years. Had just lost my father recently at the time, and was struggling with drugs and alcohol. Nikki was like a rock in my life. Always there, always happy to see me, and made me feel like some kind of hero every moment I was with her. I was committed to being a good "daddy" to her, and doing so caused me many times to make better choices and ended up being one of the biggest helps in getting off drugs and getting my partying under control. She truly makes the old saying ring true with me:
My goal in life is to be as good of a person as my dog already thinks I am.
So sorry Nikki is having trouble. Sounds like she has been a best friend and you are trying to do right by her. Along with others, I would do whatever it takes to give her some comfort, accepting that it may hasten the end for her. How can you explain to a dog that she has to hurt to live longer? It's their quality of life that matters, so I say go for the prednisone!
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