Everything You Need To Know about Cushing's disease In Dogs


Today we're going to talk about dog Cushing's disease 


Causes  of dog Cushing's disease: 

Cushing's is directly caused by an increased production of cortisol from the adrenal gland.
Now the adrenal glands are located right near the kidneys and sometimes you'll get a benign growth on the adrenal gland that will produce a lot of cortisol and cortisol has these effects on the body and cause these symptoms .
Cortisol can also cause issues with the liver .
Cortisol is a natural steroid and we need it but in excess it can cause some potential liver damage and sometimes your veterinarian may pick up the Cushing's diagnosis based on some routine blood work that's be done on your dog.

Now another way you can get increased cortisol besides an adrenal gland growth is a growth on the pituitary gland .
The pituitary gland is at the base of the brain and it produces a hormone called ACTH .
ACTH acts on the adrenal gland to produce cortisol so it's either a pituitary gland growth or an adrenal gland growth that's causing the problem .

Symptoms of dog Cushing's disease :

Cushing's disease has several symptoms that are associated with it.
The most common ones are an increased thirst and increased urination .
If you pull hair coat you'll see dogs with hair falling out are very very thin hair.
 Sometimes a potbelly the appearance.
-Increase panting .
- Increased restlessness.
- And a lot of times an increase appetite .

Diagnosis of dog Cushing's disease :

 - We diagnose Cushing's disease with a variety of tests.
My favorite that i use is the dog comes in we give it artificial ACTH  " the hormone that the pituitary usually produces"  and then we take a blood sample our baseline sample give the ACTH injection then check a blood sample two hours later and both these samples were checking for cortisol if we get a huge rise in the cortisol level in the second sample then that gives us a diagnosis of Cushing's disease .

- There are some other tests that we can use a one called a low dose dexamethasone test and one called the high dose dexamethasone tests :
sometimes these are used to diagnose Cushing's and sometimes these are used to differentiate between the adrenal gland growth and the pituitary growth.

Treatment of dog Cushing's disease :

Generally we treat Cushing's by giving medications that can decrease the activity on the adrenal gland.
They have some medications out there that can decrease the action on the pituitary gland as well but generally that's how we treat it and then we monitor the progress with these diagnostic tests that we did before the ACTH test for example to see if the cortisol levels have been brought down to normal and you should see the symptoms resolved as well and that's a way at home you can understand there whether or not your pet has resolved its symptoms..

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