Comments: 0Posted on… (date unknown)
Supporting SnippetFact.com, community driven facts about everything.
Dog Health
DBT highly recommends the The Ultimate Guide to Dog Health! ebook when learning to look after your dog or pet.
Dog Hypothyroidism Symptoms 1. Dog will sleep more than usually and be very lazy. 2. Dogs may want to spend a lot of time in warmer places of the house. 3. The dog’s skin may seem slightly thicker than normal. 4. Hair loss and possible bald patches especially on the tail, with darker skin in these areas of baldness.
What Causes Dog Hypothyroidism?
The cause of this condition is due to the dogs’ thyroid gland and its lack of ability to work properly. The thyroid glands are situated on either side of the windpipe (trachea), and control the dog’s metabolism rate and the rate in which all the cells in the body process energy and food. A higher metabolism rate results in the dog being able to eat plenty of food but never really gain much weight, and if the metabolism rate is low the dog will eat little but put weight on rapidly as the body struggles to process the energy or puts the nutrients and fats into storage. Having said this, the rate at which the thyroid glands work can be very varied, a good way to determine under active thyroids (hypothyroidism) is to measure the heart rate of the dog. In a normal case even when stressed the dog’s heart rate will be between one hundred and one hundred and twenty beats per minute. In the case of a thyroid problem this will be slowed down to fewer than 90 beats per minute. What causes the thyroid glands to under perform would be hard to find and could be due to many different factors but making this discovery would not be worth wile and the diagnosis would be the same.
What Your Vet May Say or Do
The procedure when the vet is presented with the symptoms above would normally consist of taking blood tests and viewing the heart rate of the dog to confirm that this is in fact the correct condition to treat. From here the vet will usually prescribe a treatment of thyroid supplementation tablets for the rest of the dog’s life. The treatment will be determined by long term testing by the vet and when the symptoms above have cleared up the correct dose has been found. Also if there are secondary infections such as yeast infections or other skin related problems then these will need to be treated individually according the that condition which can be found in the links below, but creams or gels may be given to stop the itching as a short term cure to ease the dogs suffering and irritation.
Other Possible Conditions
Dog Itching and Scratching
Dog Bacterial Skin Infections
Dog Allergies – Itchy Ears
Dog Allergies – Itchy Feet and Itchy Bottom
Dog Flea Allergy
Dog Fleas Information
Dog Food Allergies – Skin Allergies
Dog Hot Spots
Dog Skin Mites
Dog Fungal Skin Infections
Dog Yeast Infection 
