Canine Diabetes – Treatment Options For Your Dog

If it has been determined that your dog has diabetes, getting treated by the veteranarian as soon as possible will help prevent further complications. You may be giving your dog a chance at avoiding both nerve damage and blindness. Standard treatments will do a lot to help your dog’s progress and recovery.

Injecting Insulin

Injections of insulin will be administered to your dog either once or twice a day depending on the dog’s need. Your vet will decide how big of a dose and how often to give them to your dog. There are also insulin tablets which can be taken in place of injections, but not in all dogs.

At the beginning of the treatment smaller insulin doses are normally administered so that the blood sugar levels can stabilize gradually.
If circumstances are extreme, this process could theoretically require that your dog be hospitalized for a few days. But outpatient treatment is certainly the norm for dogs who are in pretty stable condition.

Within that initial timeframe, the veteranarian will check on your dog’s blood sugar each hour to figure out how big of a dose he will require on an ongoing basis. After determining the proper doses and frequencies of treatment, your vet will have you monitor the dog by giving him urine tests or blood tests.

Dietary Habits

With canine diabetes, nothing is more critical to increasing life expectancy than a proper diet. Actually, healthy eating plays such a central role in treating canine diabetes that the disease could possibly go into complete remission simply from a change to a more proper diet.

A proper diet for a diabetic dog consists of high fiber meals that are low in carbohydrates or have a moderate amount of carbohydrates. A great way to carry this out is by starting to cook your dog’s food on your own at home, including meats and other necessary foods.

Before you decide on a specfic diet, of course you should consult with a vet who specializes in nutrition. You should be aiming to use food as medicine so that you can eventually take your dog off of insulin.

Dogs With Diabetes ・What Causes It?

Were you aware that diabetes is an increasingly common disease in domestic pets? Up-to-date research indicates that one out of one hundred dogs is diagnosed as having diabetes. Because of that it is perfectly reasonable to expect that you learn what causes the illness and take the necessary measures to hopefully prevent it and to secure your pet’s health and wellbeing.

How Can Dogs Get Diabetes?

Sometimes specific breeds of dog are genetically disposed to acquiring diabetes. Some of these breeds are the golden retriever, the schnauzer, and the poodle. These breeds can acquire diabetes even when they are young just because they are a certain type of dog.

For other kinds of canines it is generally believed that results from another disease in the dog that destroys cells in the pancreas, then leading to diabetes. But for the majority of dogs, the cause of diabetes is too many carbohydrates in the diet combined with a sedentary way of life, which then leads to being overwight, and then – diabetes results.

Information About Carbohydrates

The same as when human beings eat too many carbohydrates, a canine’s blood sugar level will increase to a large degree after consuming a meal that is rich in carbs. It occurs very fast too. In response to this, the body then produces insulin to force the blood sugar back into the cells. These cells all have insulin receptors that open and close like a door for the purpose of regulating the flow of blood sugar.

If you consume too many carbohydrates for years and years, these “doors” start to fail and eventually stop working properly. Your canine’s body then creates more insulin which results in sporadic cycles of insulin resistance. After a while the body is no longer able to produce the insulin required to push the blood sugar back inside the cells. The end result of this phenomena is diabetes.

What Else Can Cause Diabetes in Dogs?

Overweight and aging dogs can also get diabetes from another very different way. Oftentimes, these dogs got diabetes after being given corticosteroid medication.

Either by injection or by tablet, the corticosteroids given to overweight dogs seem to have been a cause of the disease. Researchers suggest that these dogs were already genetically predisposed to getting diabetes and that the medicine was merely the trigger it needed.  The light at the end of the tunnel for such diabetes cases is that the disease may go into remission with proper diet and medication, and the dog may be able to stop his insulin indefinitely.