From:
Pam Sessoms
Date: 2001-10-09 03:51:00 UTC
Subject: Re: [Ferret-Health-list] high blood glucose...Why?
> Brutus had 5 pancreatic tumors removed last Spring, which didn't
> improve his low blood glucose (21-37),so we put him on prednisone...it
> took 1.5 mg twice a day to get his glucose up to 60's.
<snip>
> Brutus blood glucose tonight was 450 and 457. He is insulinomic and
> normally runs in the 60's.
I'm not a vet, but my ferret Sonic went through something similar awhile
back. She had insulinoma surgery, worked for awhile, then she went on
pred, and it was hard to get her blood sugar up. In her case, we also
added proglycem. Her blood sugar eventually went sky high, and she was a
raging diabetic (high blood sugar, sugar in her urine) for a short while.
We did a quick-as-possible weaning off of the pred and stopped the
proglycem cold turkey, and she was OK and back to normal in a week or two
or three (memory failing).
It was a VERY scary time, because diabetes is bad news too. I dipsticked
her urine to check for sugar and most especially ketones and was to page
my vet if her ketones were ever above trace. If ketones went above trace,
we would have started insulin immediately. At the time, I asked around,
and a few others in similar situations did start insulin and that worked
out too, although they had to be extremely careful. It's easy to bottom
ferrets out on insulin, so the goal was to regulate them around 200.
She also had a hard time with bladder infections, secondary to all the
sugar in her urine. Antibiotics worked on those.
> Can Lupron/meletonin cause high glucose?
That I don't know... But I'd be much more suspicous of the pred. To this
day, Sonic is only on small amounts of pred for returning low blood sugar,
and when I increase it above a certain point, she again veers towards
diabetes. Then I decrease it and she levels out again. I don't know why
she's like this, but it's kind of interesting.
Keep us posted. These kinds of things are pretty rare, and they are good
cases to get into the archives.
Best wishes,
-Pam S.