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I've been here not long ago to talk about my Cindy's apparent deafness and behavior. It took about a year for her to lose her hearing, even though she still responds to some high-pitched sounds. Lately at night I'll hear her licking something, I thought maybe the foot that was broken years ago. But yesterday I discovered that she licks the wall after she lays down at night, then buries her head in the corner. Sometimes she tries to dig a hole in the wall, other times she just abandons the corner and hides under a shelf in the closet. She won't use a crate, and never lays on her cushion anymore.

 

I usually get down with her and try to calm her down. It's hard to see my once-fearless girl obviously afraid of the dark. Has anyone out here noticed similar behavior with their senior friend?

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It may not actually be fear of the dark per se, but rather signs of canine cognitive disorder, which happens in aged dogs. When you say she won't use a crate do you means she's never been trained to a crate or that she pitches a fit when crated? My old guy got to the point where he couldn't see well at night. I hate night lights, but I put one in the bathroom where he spent most of his time, and it seemed to help some. He'd still run into things in low light, but in the areas he stayed at night (I used baby gates), it gave him a little light to see with. Of course he wasn't tearing up walls or anything, just got very restless at night, which tended to interrupt my sleep as I'd listen for him. If he were being destructive, I would have figured out a way to crate him or otherwise confine him in an area where he was likely to do damage or where the damage could at least be somewhat contained (one reason I didn't crate him when he got old was because he had spondylosis and his spine was fused and so it was nearly impossible for him to turn in small spaces, and even an extra large crate was difficult for him to negotiate. But for a dog without such physical issues, the crate would be my first choice.

 

J.

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Like Julie, my first thought was canine cognitive disorder. Two of my dogs have, in their teenage years, become very restless at night, abandoning their usual routines. My vets have described it as the "sundowning" phenomenon that people with age-related cognitive problems also experience.

 

In addition to the management strategies Julie suggests, you could talk to your vet to see if medication would be appropriate. I am not a person who uses drugs as the go-to solution, but they gave Johnson (and us) some relief, and we are seeing even better results with Ody and his SSRI.

 

Best of luck finding something that helps Cindy.

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I should have mentioned that Jill (who will be 15 in August) gets melatonin every night, on the advice of my holistic vet. It seems to have made a significan difference in her night time restlessness. She also sleeps in an X-pen. That came about largely because of her hip problems and fear of walking on shiny floors, so she now has a space where she can get up and move around but can't step on to any hardwood. She settles in there very nicely at night and during the day if I leave the house. But I really think the melatonin has made a big difference in helping her make it through the night more quietly (less restlessly). She does some other old dog crazy stuff, like going out in the yard and barking randomly, but I just live with that.

 

J.

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huh. Thundershirt. I'll ask around as I have several groomers and trainers nearby.

 

So far, she hasn't done any damage to walls or furniture in her efforts to get inside them. It's pretty hard to see my girl go from an otherwise happy daytime dog to a wimp at night. I don't see any fogging of her eyes yet, but I'm sure she has some vision problems.

 

No, I never had to crate train her. It took all of about 2 or 3 hours to potty train her as a pup, and I've never seen a smarter dog. There was just no reason to use a crate.

 

I've never heard of the CCD that you talked about but will do some research.

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I should have mentioned that Jill (who will be 15 in August) gets melatonin every night, on the advice of my holistic vet.

Oh, yes--I forgot, but I have friends who have also reported good results with melatonin for night-time restlessness.

 

I wonder if a Thundershirt would help with the behavior?

Good idea...which I also forgot. :) Johnson's Thundershirt seemed to alleviate his symptoms a bit, and I always think it's worth a try, especially since it comes with a money-back guarantte.

 

I've never heard of the CCD that you talked about but will do some research.

Good luck with your research. I think you'll find that being restless at night is consistently named as a main symptom of CCD. I hope you find the strategy or combination of strategies that allow you both to have peaceful nights.

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I was trying to remember Cindy's history, so I searched your old posts and saw that she's already being treated for Cushings. Although I don't have any experiencing managing Cushings + CCD, I do know that Johnson's diabetes insipidus and the medication he was already taking for it seriously limited our pharmaceutical options for managing the CCD.

 

I'm sure you already considered this and will talk with your vet, but I thought I'd mention it in case anyone else has Cushings-specific experience to offer.

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With my late Sara, I put her in a spare bedroom with a dog bed, nightlight, radio playing soft music, a few toys and a few treats when she would have night time episodes. I would always find her sleeping the next time I got up.

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We've seen some response to the treatment she's getting for the Cushing's. The blood work is normal now, so we'll keep up the treatment.

 

One thing funny about the whole mess is that when she's asleep I can walk around her, over her, plink her nose gently, or have an orchestra playing Nessun Dorma in the living room and she's just out like a rock. If I dare touch her shoulder she jumps a mile! Her days as a watch dog are over.

 

I've read quite a bit about canine cognitive dysfunction and, based on what I've found, Cindy does not have any real symptoms. It seems to affect memory and normal, functional activity. Cindy during the day is completely normal except for an occasional accident in the house. Earlier messes this year were due to a Clostridium imbalance and that was cleared up. Her little Yorkie buddy gets a treat now and then, as Cindy does, but the dinky little thing just hordes them instead of eating them right away. EVERY morning Cindy will goes to EVERY spot the Yorkie hangs out to see if she left a treat behind. It's like she's on a mission. That's not symptomatic of CCD. Good thing. Treatment is expensive.

 

But it's good that you've alerted me. She's almost 13 years and now I expect almost anything.

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Treatment is expensive.

I'm curious about what you found in your research on CCD that makes you state this? The SSRI Ody takes costs only $11 for 100 pills. At a dose of 1 pill/day, that's amazingly cheap.

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Angie,

When I discussed CCD with my vet he said there was one main medication, anipryl, and that it had been taken off the market for a while and then brought back but only for veterinary use. A quick Google search showed prices around $65-70 for 30 tablets.

 

My vet never mentioned SSRI as a possible treatment. That makes me wonder if different vets are calling different things CCD or if vets are simply trying out alternatives like SSRIs because anipryl is so expensive.

 

The Cushing's thing is interesting. I probably posted it before, but with Boy we made the decision not to worry about Cushings (he had obvious signs of it) because we figured that given his skeletal issues (fused spine, persistent lameness as a result, etc.) the possible excess cortisol in his system from Cushing's was actually serving a "protective" function for his problem joints (just like steroid treatment would provide) and if we decreased the cortisol signficantly then we would have to come up with some pretty serious pain management to take its place. Of course by then he was 15, which is pretty much about as old as border collies get, so it wasn't really an issue of prolonging his life at that point, but making sure he was pain-free and as mobile as possible.

 

Cindy,

Boy got to be a very deep sleeper in the last year of his life. One more than one occasion I actually thought he had died in his sleep because I could yell (he was essentially deaf) and prod and push and he wouldn't wake up. But eventually he would. Not a good feeling, though, to go into his area (usually the space between the tub and toilet in the bathroom) in the mornings and not be able to rouse him....

 

J.

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Julie,

 

Thanks for the reply. :) I actually have experience with anipryl because it's what Johnson took, and I agree it is not a cheap option: the prices you found were right around what we paid for it. We saw results with anipryl almost immediately, and it worked for a short time (a few months). But when Johnson's symptoms could no longer be managed with it, even when we'd maxed out the daily dose, we started looking for other options--only to find his other meds eliminated SSRIs as a choice.

 

When Ody started exhibiting similar cognitive symptoms, then, I talked quite a bit with the vet who owns the clinic (Dr. P.) about how to treat him. Dr. P., a young vet only a few years out of school, said, "I know Dr. S. had you on anipryl for Johnson, and I know there were reasons he needed to use that drug. But I prefer to start out with SSRIs, and I've had really good success treating conditions like this with some of the newer ones." So we started on citalopram at the beginning of this month and thus far have been really pleased.

 

I do think that the "cognitive disorder" diagnosis is a loose one and mostly one of elimination. But I also got the sense from the two vets at my clinic that there is also a generational difference in what to prescribe. Dr. S. is nearing retirement and freely admits that Dr. P. is more up-to-date on pharmaceutical options than she is. And I don't know exactly how many cognitive disorder dogs Dr. P. has treated this way in his 2-3 years of practice, but I think he used terms like "several."

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Thank you, Julie. It took me a while to find the cost discussion that I was reading through. Anipril was about $100 per month, Novifit was $70 per month, and there was no mention of SSRI. I think that expense is relative, and varies depending on our own situations. I think most of us would rather treat our furry friends as one of our own and spare no expense to protect them, but I've witnessed the opposite.

 

I think I'm safe in assuming Cindy does not have CCD as yet. She might just relate the night with thunderstorms, as we had several last year and she reacts to lightning.

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I'm glad to hear Cindy isn't showing other kinds of CCD signs during the day.

 

I wonder, though, if the night-time issue might be more of an ongoing or serious one than this thread indicates? I thought, from your OP, that it was a new behavior she'd recently developed. But, as I mentioned yesterday, I looked back at your earlier threads about Cindy to see if she was on other meds, etc. I noticed these two that you'd started, both to discuss restless/unsettled behavior at night.

 

Panting at night (July 2009)

Senility (April 2011)

 

Obviously, you know your own dog best, but both of these threads mention Cindy being very uncomfortable at night (in the second one, you say she "seems terrified"), and her behavior these two previous times also concerned you enough that you posted about it. So I wonder if touching base with your vet might still be appropriate to see if he or she has any ideas about how to make the night more comfortable for Cindy, regardless of what the cause may be.

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It's true that my first concern involved panting at night, ravenous appetite, and her drinking almost constantly. Cushing's was diagnosed and the panting/appetite/drinking has subsided with treatment.

 

The signs that she isn't comfortable anywhere at night is something fairly new, or maybe just hidden all this time by the symptoms of Cushings. I think the best way to describe it is 'at night, no place is safe enough'. I think I should consider her hearing loss as the main cause since it's an important sense that she's lost, and she doesn't know how to deal with it. What I was looking for here was another BC that showed similar behavior, like licking the wall and trying to hide. She doesn't lick just any wall, only where she sleeps at night. I did mention it to the vet at her last blood test visit and the response I got was in the form of Valium, which I don't like to use unless we have severe weather.

 

The good thing is that she's still very demanding and full of energy during the day, and she still won't let me touch her frisbee without giving her something in return!

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It's really good to hear Cindy is still so much herself during the day! And I can totally understand why you don't want to use diazepam as a maintenance drug.

 

I'll be interested in what connections other folks may draw between hearing loss and this night-time behavior, though. Ody is my fourth teenaged BC and my second one to lose his hearing almost entirely in his senior years. (And he's blind now, as well.) I haven't personally seen any correlation between hearing loss and the symptoms you describe, but my sample size is quite small.

 

What do you think about the melatonin option Julie uses? My understanding is that it's a safe and inexpensive treatment. I know it must be hard to see her unable to get comfortable and be peaceful at night.

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I'll just add again that melatonin has been a God-send for me with Jill. I wish I had used it with Boy. Boy was my first real geriatric, and right now I have one who just turned 14 and another (Jill) who will be 15 in August. Jill and Willow, and Boy before them (he died in October at just over 15 1/2), are hard of hearing. They aren't completely deaf; it's clear they can usually hear *something* when I call, but have no idea where the sound is coming from. To get Jill's attention, especially, I have to use loud clapping. Once I get her attention, I think she can read my body language that tells her I want her to come to me (Boy was the same way). The hearing issue is enough of a problem that if I have to take Jill with me to sheepdog trials, I mostly have to keep her leashed when we go on walks with the pack or she'll wander and not hear me calling her (which means I have to leave everyone else to their own devices while I go run down Jill...).

 

The main cognitive issue Boy had was that if I let him in the house in low light (say, at night), he would sometimes veer too far to the left and get between a rocking chair and the wall. He wouldn't be able to figure his way back out of the "trap." He also would run into the wall at the side of the doorway opening he was aiming for. According to my vet, he did have some cataracts, but they weren't bad enough to be considered affecting his vision. And I didn't notice any of these issues during the day (well he would sometimes get stuck, but rarely). But at night or in low light, he clearly had trouble seeing.

 

The good thing about the onset of deafness in my old dogs has been that they are no longer bothered by thunder (the silver lining?).

 

Anyway, all this is to say that I have not noticed a correlation between going deaf with age and nighttime problems. Both Jill and Boy before her experienced a lot of nighttime restlessness, and that's what the melatonin has seemed to help with Jill (as an aside, I also use it at night to help calm dogs during thunderstorms, so I think it could be helpful for Cindy in that regard). Jill did develop an inclination to panic on shiny/slick floors when she reached middle age (9 or 10). The vet could find no ophthmalogical basis for this panic, but now that she's older (and has very bad hips) I keep supposedly non-slip rugs and runners all over the place. It's the main reason she's confined to an X-pen at night as well--she can't get on the hardwood floor and panic or fall and injure herself.

 

Willow, the 14-year-old, while hard of hearing so far doesn't have any of the other nighttime issues that were/are experienced by Boy and Jill. But she's had enough other health problems (heart problems, incontinence, arthritis, and mast cell cancer) so maybe she'll be spared the old dog cognitive issues.

 

Anyway, that's my long-winded answer to Cindy's questions: my older dogs who have gone deaf have not shown any evidence of deafness being the cause of nighttime behavior changes, FWIW.

 

You can get melatonin OTC at any pharmacy, and probably some grocery stores. I use it occasionally as a sleep aid for myself, Jill gets it nightly at bedtime, and the thunderphobes get it at bedtime if we're having storms or are expecting storms. It does seem to work for all of our various needs.

 

J.

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