03/28/12 - I wanted to share a new study that Caroline Levin published
recently. It is a retrospective study of 5 dogs, who had the adrenal panel run
at the University of Tennessee. Though the sample size is small, the information is still important.
UTenn calls increased sex hormones and high/low/normal cortisol
"Atypical Cushing's" (which I find personally a little confusing, because a high cortisol result on a panel usually means truly low cortisol if the sex hormones are elevated at the same time, so it seems to me it should be called "Atypical Addison's" but that's
neither here nor there...). The lab recommends a treatment for this condition of flax lignans,
melatonin, and sometimes mitotane or trilostane.
The five dogs presented in Caroline's study underwent
low-dose cortisol replacement therapy and the sex hormone levels were reduced
in every case.
The PDF is below for those who are interested. As always for
Caroline, she includes a plain-English translation for those who are not
as scientifically inclined, which I think is great. :)
Have any of my readers had the UTenn panel for their dogs?
I did for Reo at the start - and it showed elevated sex hormones, elevated cortisol. we did the UTenn panel parallel with the
NVDS blood panel, but we didn't repeat the UTenn bloodwork, once we started
walking down the path of treatment (plus, I didn't like UTenn's suggestions for
treatment of Reo's condition, as I felt that cortisol replacement was the right
choice for Reo).
One noteworthy item that I've discussed before is that high cortisol levels can be
misleading (and should be examined together with total estrogen and/or sex
hormones). There is no reason for a dog to have BOTH elevated estrogen and elevated
cortisol (as was true in Reo's case, initially), and so it was that Reo's
cortisol number was very LOW (shown in subsequent blood testing).
More food for thought!
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