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Cyclosporine for IMPA ?

Started by Whipaway, January 23, 2020, 09:02:40 AM

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Whipaway


Can anyone tell me if they have any experience of using  cyclosporine as treatment for IMPA ?
We are looking for alternative treatment to steroids & Azathioprine.
If anyone could advise or share there experiences it wold be much appreciated.
Thanks

BrookeR

I used cyclosporine as treatment for my staffy with impa. It was some years ago now. We had been incorrectly advised by an inexperienced vet about weaning of pred protocols and as such she ended up being at the high doses of pred for too long. She began suffering bad side effects and her liver needed a break, so we had to introduce in another immune suppressing drug. It takes a while of taking before it gets in their system enough to be effective. It wasn't as effective as pred for my girl. Even for all preds horrible side effects and as much as I wish we didn't need it, it it is a great drug and efficiently treats such conditions. We ended up having to use really high doses of the cyclosporine to get the levels of it in her system high enough for immune suppressing. It did also make her unwell, but that was manageable. The price was very painful for us as well. I'm in australia and I think it was costing me around $400 for 2 weeks. Everyone absorbs it differently so your dog may not need as high a dose as we needed to achieve immune suppression. You also need to be careful to check contraindications. Things such as Cranberry juice can affect the efficiency and levels in the system.
All this being said I don't know that any of these are immune suppressing drugs are really 'nice'. But they have their purpose. The cyclosporine did the job for us. It gave us enough time to be able to rest her liver from the pred. We then weaned from the cyclosporine and remained on lower doses of pred. If I didn't use the cyclosporine she wouldn't be here. So it was definitely effective and did it's job. I wrote on this forum a lot when my girl was on cyclosporine. So maybe if you do a search you will find some of my posts about her journey on cyclosporine.
Brooke with
Pepper, the English Staffy (IMPA since Dec 2014)
NSW Australia

Whipaway

Thanks for taking your time to post this information.
I will attempt to find some of your older posts. Thanks again.