thyroid

[Liz P]

I did a 6 month internship with a vet who is currently doing a study on hypothyroid dogs. He needed a few more in the study so I let him test my oldest male. Well, he was hypothyroid and probably had been for years, although no vet had ever diagnosed him. That, of course, made me pretty upset because he had all the classic signs and had started to go downhill fast about the time we got the test results. My BC now has partial bilateral facial nerve paralysis and some neurological deterioration in his pelvic limbs because of his low thyroid levels. The other symptoms are annoying and can be dealt with, but if his facial nerve paralysis gets any worse he won't be able to eat or drink. As it is he is at risk for oral ulcers and can't open his mouth very wide when he needs to pant. I am having his levels tested again later in the month to make sure I am giving him the right dose of replacement hormone.

 

The vet I did the internship with asked if he could test my dog because he is a BC. He said the breed is known for being hypothyroid and believes a fairly high percent are affected but never diagnosed. Owning a dog who is suffering from some of the nastier complications of having low thyroid hormone levels makes me concerned about the breed. I asked a few breeders if they test their dogs. Not many had, and those that tested their dogs did not do so as a pre breeding check. A lot of the dogs tested had come back low, all the ones that came back low had been bred because thier owners didn't feel it was a problem in the breed.

 

I am feeling a bit frustrated right now because I've never met a working breeder that screened their dogs. I know we can't test for every disease, but $30 doesn't seem like all that much to me, especially when I have to watch my loyal old friend suffer.

 

For those that are interested, I'll include the symptoms my dog had which should have been a red flag to any vet.

 

-allergies

-dry skin in the winter

-gray hairs on his face by the time he was 3, even more by the time he was 5

-more neurotic than the average BC (paw licking, sep anxiety, thunder phobia)

-ear infections (at least once a year)

-dull coat if he didn't get extra omega 3s

-became very grumpy when he turned 10

[laurie etc]

That's interesting Liz. Coming from a life with Golden Retrievers, I recognize those symptoms quite well. Doing Golden Rescue, we ended up testing at least 50-75% of the dogs who came through our system, and found an amazing number were hypothyroid - with a span of symptoms from hot spots/ ear infections/ overweight/ lethargic to aggression and seizures.

I'm wondering, does the vet you are working with see any correlation to aquired (or hereditary predisposition to) general autoimmune problems? Or the possibility of precipitation by over-vaccination?

[Liz P]

That is kind of a chicken and the egg type question. In general Border Collies have the type of hypothyroid disease in which the dog's own body attacks and destroys the thyroid gland (usually between the ages of 2 and 4). What we don't know is whether that is caused by genetics alone or you must first give too many vaccines to get things rolling. In either case, we know BCs have a genetic predisposition to the disease.

 

That's why I am so frustrated. I feel like we are in denial about how bad the problem is in the breed. Most BCs I know suffer from allergies, hot spots, dry skin and coat at least a few times a year by the time they are 4. Their owners just increase the daily intake of omega 3s and move on with life. How many of them are hypothyroid? Why are we accepting these conditions and not trying to do anything about them?

 

People test for hips and eyes because if a dog is blind or has bad HD it can't work. I know my dog is 11 now, but he should have at least a few more years of light work (FUN!) in him. Should I really just say to myself, "Oh well, he had 10 good years" and move on?

 

I am getting the rest of my dogs tested this spring and summer, mostly out of curiosity. BTW, some of the show people do test and act really proud of that fact, but it's a waste of money to do in a young dog. You need to wait until the dog is 4 or 5 years old to be sure.

[Kyrasmom]

I think thyroid testing is slowly becoming more common for symptons other than bad coat or weight issues but it's still not the first thing a vet will consider. I had to push to get my dog tested and he turned out to be very very low and had a great coat and was underweight. He was also in a perpetual state of PMS which was why I wanted him tested to being with.

 

Maria

[Barb Scott]

When my BC Skye was about 6 years old, he started acting different. He really did not show hypothyroid symtoms, but I knew something was wrong. (He'd gather himself up before jumping, abort double and triply jumps and limp on and off on different legs.) A few months later, his full brother started having seizures, and our vet wanted to do blood tests on him. I brought both BCs in and had them tested. Blaze's (with seizures)blood tests were well in the normal ranges. Skye was diagnosed as hypothyroid and also anemic. By then, Skye was showing hypothyroid symtoms such as hair loss. My vet apologised for not testing him sooner!

Barb S

[nancy]

Wish my doctor appologized for taking so long to spot my hypothyroidism. In fact, all he did was check what the lab highlighted. It took a new lab, using the new levels, to give me the information. Then I had to fight my doctor to get him to use the new levels.

 

And when he sent me to an endocrinologist, she claimed that the original level at which to worry were way too high! She said I was fine and the problems were all in my head. Yup, the depression was. But fingernails that didn't just chip but peeled off in layers?

 

I found a new doctor.

[AK dog doc]

This thread is really interesting to me, and quite curious. For instance, I do see a lot of Labs and goldens with hotspots and ear disease, but I almost never see a BC with those issues - in fact, I can't remember the last time I saw a BC with a hotspot. I wonder if that's a regional difference - we're lots cooler up here, and perhaps the local genetics differ. Also, our clinic does a lot of thyroid testing - I'd estimate our clinic sends in between 3 and 10 tests per week, depending on the season (some diagnostic, some for theraputic monitoring). I often have to push to get the test done, rather than the client having to push me (again, I suspect that's a regional difference - we're still a bit "frontier" up here, and sometimes I feel like I'm forcibly dragging certain of my clients into the 21st century, kicking and screaming. Others are much more progressive.) It's just odd to hear stories about people having to demand tests - not that I doubt they're true, but to me it's inconceivable that a client should ask me to do a test and I would refuse. (Well, once I refused to do an antifreeze test, but it was one hour after having ALREADY run an antifreeze test on the same dog, and the dog was not only negative, but had had MORE than enough of being tested at that point. The owner had a mental disorder of some kind and it didn't seem right to make the dog pay for that. Retesting was not only medically unnecessary but would have constituted harm to the dog, so in that case I DID refuse. But that's the only time I've ever refused to test if an owner wanted it.) I just can't picture refusing a legitimate test that will not harm the patient, particularly with a concerned owner who is willing to do the workup. That's just strange.

 

Also, having asked the endocrinologists at MSU (where we send our thyroid tests) I can say that their advice has been that even if the test does not document hypothyroidism, if the dog is symptomatic and other tests are not finding another responsible disease, it's not wrong to consider trial treatment. So it seems weird to me that a vet would not offer that to a client - I do it routinely. The pitfall is that you don't want to assume that the thyroid test must be wrong because the dog is symptomatic, and fail to look for other diseases which might be the actual culprit - but neither do you want to forget that 1) dogs are individual, and "normal" for an average dog may not be normal for THIS dog, 2) thyroid hormone affects every system in the body so thyroid disease can manifest in a wide variety of ways, and may not be "typical", and 3) when faced with a disparity between what the dog is telling you and what the lab report is telling you, you should believe the dog. I once had a 3 year old Akita patient which had GORGEOUS coat and was in every way physically perfect, except that he had splitty toenails (his test came back abnormal, luckily - I might have had a hard time selling hypothyroidism otherwise, as he was not the usual age and sex and was otherwise so robust). I had another dog about 5 weeks ago whose only symptom was crankiness with the other dogs. That test came back low normal, but we trial treated. I imagine you won't be surprised to learn that the behavior problems vanished about 3 weeks after we started meds. We've had megesophagus dogs, seizure dogs, thin dogs, fat dogs, flaky dogs, oily dogs, lethargic dogs, active dogs, male dogs, female dogs, young dogs, old dogs, bald dogs, furry dogs, purebred dogs, mutt dogs, neutered dogs, unneutered dogs, practically every kind of dog you can think of which has had thyroid disease. I won't say there's no such thing as a "typical" hypothyroid dog, but I WILL say there is CERTAINLY such a thing as an "atypical" one - and those abound.

 

Anyway, Liz, I hope things are going better for your dog, and I'm glad you got a diagnosis.

 

Oh, as a BTW, for clarity - it's not just BCs that have autoimmune thyroiditis as the main source of hypothyroidism, but ALL dogs. Also, thyroid disease in and of itself is not itchy - but it certainly leads to a variety of conditions which ARE itchy, and it may also occur in tandem with other unrelated diesases which are itchy.

[Liz P]

Amen to that! The vet I worked with probably tested 80% of the dogs that came through his door. He found that certain breeds naturally have higher levels than others, so they are very often in the normal range but still need replacement hormone. If I remember correctly it was several Spitz type breeds (Akitas too?). Sometimes he would just go ahead and treat to see what happened if he still suspected the dog was hypothyroid but they levels were within normal.

 

From now on I'll be testing my dogs at a year old to get a baseline and again at age 4 to see if they have gone down. I can't stand the idea of anyone else having to think about putting their loyal companion of 10 years down because he can't open his mouth any longer. We are taking it day by day right now and praying he does recover 100%.

[Tassie]

This is interesting. A previous dog of mine (KelpiexBC) was hypothyroid - diagnosed by test treatment at about 3, when her severe bilateral hair loss hadn't responded to any other treatment. This was some 20 years ago, when hypothyroidism wasn't generally recognized in small animal medicine here, and there were no blood tests available in the state for small animals. When the blood tests did become available, it appeared that Jess needed to have levels at the very high end of the normal range in order to be really well. Luckily for us, the hair loss was the only symptom, and thyroxine therapy at a high dose was very successful. She lived to be 15 and a half, and AFAIK the symptoms which made me eventually have her PTS were unrelated to the thyroid condition.

 

Now I'm wondering if it isn't a good idea to have my current two Border Collies (age 4) tested, if only to establish a baseline. I haven't seen any symptoms, but my boy is quite an anxious boy, and my girl is certainly getting grey hairs on her face - I thought it might be the stress of trying to get me to handle her better in agility!

 

Liz, I do hope your senior man responds to treatment.