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Joined: Jan 2016
Hi, my name is Geraldine and my dog Ernie was diagnosed with IL by process of elimination in September 2015. He's 9.5 year old Yorkshire Terrier and weighs about 6.5 lbs. Just rewind back a year from his diagnosis, one of his "cousins" died of PLE so I had Ernie's blood work taken and he was good so I feel like I've caught this pretty early, but I'm still very worried. Back to today...Shortly after Ernie's diagnosis, he was put on a prednisone regimen of 2.5mg twice day w/WD. He was weened down to a prednisone regimen of 1.25mg a day with good blood results so we decided to ween him completely off of the prednisone-this was my first mistake. For the next 2 week,s we went to 1.25mg of prednisone every other day followed by 2 weeks of nothing until he relapsed. He stops eating and also gets loose stool so I'm lucky like that because he tells me right away something is wrong. Anyway, his new prednisone dosage is 1.25mg twice day plus azathioprine. He's been on the new prednisone regimen for 2-3 weeks and we added the azathioprine 1.5 weeks ago because he wasn't improving. It is very frustrating because he had good blood work when he was taking 1/2 the dosage of prednisone and no azathioprine and now with double the amount of prednisone we can't get him where he needs to be. You wouldn't know anything is wrong by his behavior (he's very playful and has good stool), but we need good blood work . I feel like we need to change his diet, but I'm not really sure where do start. I trust my veterinarian implicitly and think she loves Ernie has much as me (we are good friends and she lived with me for a short period of time) but I feel we could be doing something more with Ernie's diet, but I'm not sure what. We are also giving him Purina FortiFlora, but sometimes I think that's a scam as well. I'm hoping this forum will help me find the right protocol for Ernie. And really appreciate you, Louie's mom, creating it.
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Hi Geraldine. I'm glad you found us. There are lots of blog posts about diet on the blog which you can access at
http://louiethelovemuffin.com
The key to dietary control is to feed a very low-fat diet. No readily available commercial foods are low enough to work and many create their own home-cooked diets using various lean proteins like bison, tilapia, venison, egg whites, lean turkey or even kangaroo.
Check out this post and hopefully it will help you.
http://www.louiethelovemuffin.com/wp/page/2/
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(01-10-2016, 11:43 AM)LouiesMom Wrote: Hi Geraldine. I'm glad you found us. There are lots of blog posts about diet on the blog which you can access at http://louiethelovemuffin.com
The key to dietary control is to feed a very low-fat diet. No readily available commercial foods are low enough to work and many create their own home-cooked diets using various lean proteins like bison, tilapia, venison, egg whites, lean turkey or even kangaroo.
Check out this post and hopefully it will help you.
http://www.louiethelovemuffin.com/wp/page/2/
Hi, Ernie's on Hill's W/D. I read the blogs and still feel very clueless as to where to start. And I'm nervous to change his food because right now too because I have no reason to believe it isn't good for him since Ernie did have good blood work with this food and a low dosage of prednisone. I want to go to a nutritionist, but I'm waiting until his next blood test which will probably be next week. Did you work with a nutrionist to figure out what to feed Louie? Should we move this conversation to the feeding blog?
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With good stools? Wow! Every once and a while we would have "a golden poo" (AKA normal for any other dog) but for the most part we always had something so soft it would be difficult to pick up. My vet said FortiFlora works for some dogs, but it didn't help us and Cosmo hated it. Long term what worked for Cosmo was Budesonide (instead of prednisone), benadryl, novel protein source, 11% fat DRY WEIGHT BASIS, and limiting carbs which seemed to toss his gut flora into a tissy if he got too much. As usual, it seems every dog is different so YMMV.
I'll start watching for the food & feeding posts.
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Hi Geraldine,
Just a comment about FortiFlora. It is not fat free. They add flavouring to make it more tasty and in doing so they are actually adding fat. If you feel you need a probiotic I would recommend finding one that is 0% fat. I've got Annie on ProGut Plus by Ceva. She won't eat it so I need to put it in a syringe and squirt it into her mouth (I actually mix it with water and a bit of low-fat wet food).
Best of wishes for Ernie!
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Thank you! I will ask my veterinarian about it!
