From:
sukiec@optonline.net
Date: 2003-06-03 19:14:05 UTC
Subject: Re: [ferrethealth] vena cava ligation chances? referrals?
To: ferrethealth@smartgroups.com
Message-ID: <7936403.1054667645871.JavaMail.root@thallium.smartgroups.com>
Back when Lysodren was used in one of our crew (my darling Hjalmar) -- something like 15 years ago or more -- it did not seem to do much for his bad adrenal but it atrophied his good one and we eventually wound up with him having to have Florinef. He was one of the first to use that med so you get an idea how long that has been used in ferrets.
I think that there is an incorrect feeling for how often ferrets who are not elderly get Prednisone in the U.S. First off, we have over 1,100 members here and if you assume that there is an average of 4 to 5 ferrets per reader (a number which seems to work for a different list and may even be a touch low for here given the amount of shelters among the membership) then that is something between 4,400 to 5,500 ferrets represented in the memvership. Then add to that the tendency to post more times about things that are hard to control (like IBD) or rare (like severe injury) which is a good tendency because it helps ferrets more and gets together a better database and the result can be an incorrect feeling that steroids are given to a lot of young or middle aged ferrets.
For our family, with ferret members for 21 years I think that we maybe had three who ever had steroids in middle age or younger. Two of those were terminally ill (both being the most severely deformed ones we ever adopted).
Meanwhile, we have had a number of benign adrenal neoplasias here, and two with adrenal malignancies (one corrected fully by surgery who lived to ripe old age when she finally died of advanced cardiomyopathy, and one lymphoma). I think that we had only one ferret who ever had steroids before he had an adrenal growth and even with him I am not sure which order they were in because they were close. We've had only one early adrenal growth ferret (during a time hwen we didn't provide a lot of darkness) and we do tend to typically jump fast into surgical correction so growths usually were not left to possibly worsen.
Anyway, I think that the impressions a person can pick up from list discussions don't tend to reflect rates accurately.