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Female has always had incontinence

5K views 14 replies 6 participants last post by  Castlemaid 
#1 ·
Our female GSD Gretchen was found at Walmart when she was about 6 weeks old. From the time we had her at home, I noticed she would urinate in her sleep a lot. I didn't think too much of it until I noticed she was having difficulty urinating. Vet gave her antibiotics for the infection but wanted to investigate the incontinence before putting our young girl on any prescription. I did a lot of laundry! I brought in almost weekly urine samples, we mixed prescription food with her regular puppy food...nothing was helping.

Finally, when I brought her in to be fixed at about 6 months, the vet was going to take a urine sample directly from her bladder. Well, that didn't work out because as soon as Gretchen was put under for surgery, she completely released her bladder. The vet then decided to put her on Proin.

We had her on 1.5 pills twice per day for a while, which worked wonders. Her appetite changed but other than that we didn't notice any difference. Then she started to leak again so we put her up to 2 pills twice per day. When that didn't work, the vet put her on Incurin, which is hormone based. We started Incurin about 2 and a half weeks ago. Gretchen has had a lot more energy since then. We realized the Proin was causing some loss of energy, in addition to the small appetite.

To start Incurin, we gave Gretchen 2 pills once a day for 2 weeks. They started to work almost immediately. After 2 weeks the vet said to reduce it to 1 pill to see if that would still work. No such luck! We found a small wet spot after Gretchen had been resting on the couch. We are hoping maybe she will adjust to this 1 pill dose. We have to wait 7 days between each dosage change. Incurin is less expensive than Proin, but still $20 for 30 pills. Between her low-quality prescription food (Royal Canin SO dry) at $70 for a 25 pound bag, which fixes her UTI issues, and her Incurin for incontinence, which may be another $40 per month...Gretchen is turning into an expensive dog!

Does anyone have any experience with Incurin? It is relatively new. I didn't mean to write so much but thought maybe someone else had experienced a similar issue.
 
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#4 ·
I was going to ask if they'd ever looked for an ectopic ureter or if she was having sphincter issues. Dogs who leak from when they are young often have those kind of troubles. The surgeons I work for have actually placed artificial sphincters in a few patients who really were having trouble. They have a port that is accessible under the skin to add or remove saline as needed and seem to be pretty helpful. Not sure how old your kid is or if that option has ever been brought to your attention.

Definitely not a fun thing to have to deal with at a young age!
 
#6 ·
Colie, our vet did mention that there is a surgery, but at the time Gretchen was so young. Since so far it's been managed with medication we'd like to stick to that. She is currently about 15 months old. It's good to know that's an option and seems successful!

Lisa, our vet checked everything out when Gretchen was under for her spay surgery and it all looked normal. As for food, we need to keep her on Royal Canin SO due to recurring UTIs - otherwise I'd play around with her diet. We did have her on a higher quality affordable brand dry food until we finally had to switch to the prescription brand :\ I do realize that changing her food can fix the incontinence AND the UTIs... but honestly right now we're just looking for a few months of dryness!! When we're ready to research food these forums will be the first place I check.
 
#7 ·
No experience with Incurin - but I have a female that has spay incontinence. She started leaking shortly after her spay, when she was a little over a year old.

At first we tried the estrabol (?) - synthetic estrogen, but it didn't help. The next step would have been Proin, but after reading up on it, I decided to not medicate, and just live with having to do a lot of laundry. :)

Shortly after this, I switched her to a 100% raw diet, and it turned out that the change in her diet did wonders to control her incontinence. There would still be some occasional leakage, but the incidents went from daily to maybe once a month, if that.

If I put Keeta back on kibble, or canned or try home-cooked, the incontinence comes back, even after one day on kibble. The Raw diet may not work for everyone, but may be worth looking into.
 
#9 ·
Definitely makes sense! I think the youngest one we did it on was like 12 months. You can generally scope the bladder to look for things, but some times it is hard to find ectopic ureters. They tend to be slow leakers however. We use CT with contrast to diagnose those lol.

Just wanted to know if you guys were aware. :) I am not too certain on medications. Generally speaking the general practice vets who I work with would send something like that over to the specialists that I work with. And I work for the three surgeons more than anything else. While I still hear, learn and ask about a lot of things, most of my world is imaging, surgery and anesthesia.
 
#10 ·
Thanks for the added advice. I am honestsly not very familiar with raw diets so I may have to look into that as well.
After a few weeks on the Incurin (which is a synthetic estrogen), Gretchen again leaked today. We already have an appointment for Friday for her shots so if she has more accidents I'll have to ask about other options.
Colie, do you know how much that surgery you described would cost? If that is an option for us... I passed on cataract surgery for my other dog because he is 7 and they can adapt pretty well. But if Gretchen's going to be a therapy dog I can't have her leaking everywhere!
 
#12 ·
Thank you for the link to the other threads! I had tried searching before I posted but didn't find anything related - Gretchen has been incontinent since before spay so it is congenital. However the threads you provided had some more info.
We are 2 hours from College Station, I will talk to my vet this week about options and specialists.
 
#15 ·
Sounds like chronic low-grade UTI. Hope the lab results will give you definite answers and a focus for treating her.

Thank you for the link to the other threads! I had tried searching before I posted but didn't find anything related - Gretchen has been incontinent since before spay so it is congenital. However the threads you provided had some more info.
It's not the surgery of the spay in and of itself that is the cause of spay incontinence, but the loss of estrogen production after the removal of the ovaries. Estrogen helps in keeping the sphincter muscle working properly, and drop in estrogen production is often what causes the spay incontinence. That is why it is sometimes treated with synthetic estrogen supplementation.

Estrogen is also produced in other parts of the body, not just the ovaries, so most of the time a spay won't cause incontinence. It is possible that some dogs just don't produce enough estrogen, ovaries and all, but I guess that would be pretty rare. Just wanted to put that info out about possible causes of incontinence and possible fixes. :)
 
#13 ·
Probably depends slightly on your region and what kind of specialists you have in your area. I would need to look up one of the dogs we have done it on, but normally a lot of those surgeries fall in the 1500-2000 range. The ectopic ureter can be a same day go home procedure, but placing one of those artificial sphincters is something we like keeping a patient overnight with to make sure that it isn't too tight and causing other problems. I think however where I work our prices tend to be less than most other specialty hospitals in other areas.

One client often flies to us to have us do things on her dog from Chicago because it's still cheaper even with airfare added in.
 
#14 ·
We just had an ultrasound done, and everything looks normal - bladder walls, all the necessary tubes are the right lengths, connected to the right places, no blockages or kinks anywhere. But her bladder "looks like a snowglobe with all the crystals floating around." Sent off a urine sample directly from her bladder and waiting for those results.
She's been on Royal Canin SO prescription food for these crystals and since that's not working we will be switching her off of it, since it's pretty expensive. I've been looking into raw diets, but found that maybe trying grain-free and adding cranberry to her diet can help. I'm also planning to buy a pH test kit so we can test ourselves at home regularly.
But, thanks for all the advice - I'll keep this updated as we learn more!
 
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