Hi everyone . I only joined this fantastic forum yesterday so I hope I'm posting this correctly !! . I have a wonderful lab bitch called smudge , she turned 2 in September . Sometime around last may she developed a slight cough . She only seemed to cough when she got down from sleeping on our couch , just a small couple of coughs . I then deceived to take her to the vet just to be sure and they checked all the vital organs etc and prescribed some steroids . Another month passed without much improvement so took her back and they sone the same again in checking her over and prescribed more steroids . 2 weeks passed but her cough seemed to be becoming more frequent so back to the vet who now prescribed antibiotics along with an increased doze of steroids . Yet another 2 weeks passed with no improvement so back to the vets . More steroids and booked in for X-rays and camera down her throat if no improvement in 2 weeks . That day came so back she went to get knocked out . I picked her up at night and the only thing the vet could find was some white frothy mucus in her throat . Smudge was given a white powder to sprinkle over her biscuits for the next 3 weeks . This made her cough worse as the mucus was breaking up . As it stands now her cough , on a scale of one to ten , is about a 3 . She comes to the shoots with me here on the estate and certainly doesn't lack energy of drive . Hopefully one of you many lab lovers out there will have hopefully come across this type of thing before and can possibly shed some light on it . It's been going on for 6 months now . Thanks in advance
Oh goodness, that must be a worry for you. The only things that come to mind are kennel cough (but vet has presumably checked), an obstruction in the throat (again, he's checked), something in her lungs (I have seen photos of pieces of grain that a dog has inhaled; but presumably the xrays ruled that out), and worst case scenario, lung cancer - but again, I guess the vet checked for that. I think if it was me I would be going to a different vet for a second opinion. I hope you find out soon what is causing it - and above all that it is nothing serious. Oh - and welcome to the forum, by the way!
Hi Kenny and welcome to the forum. I'm afraid I have no experience to offer, but hope you get a resolution soon. Your poor girl must be very uncomfortable
Yeah thanks , all the above has been checked along with lungworms treatment that I forgot to mention , smudge doesn't cough all the time , she has a couple of days when she only coughs 2 or 3 times then she's fine for a few hours . There is no pattern to it at all . I had her away at a shoot yesterday and she covered as much ground as any other dog there so she's fit . She's booked into the small animal hospital in Edinburgh on Monday but it's going to be very costly , I wish I'd discovered this forum sooner .
Yes , it's been checked every time I'm there and also when she was in the vets for the day knocked out etc .
Steroids would have helped that (along with asthma) And antibiotics would have zapped that. Reflux? Is that what the powder was about? Laryngeal paralysis? - a bit old for that, and particularly if she is fit and active, keeping up with the shoot, unless she might have had some trauma to her throat. She could possibly have something stuck right up the back of her nose which is causing a "post nasal drip" ?? I hope they find an answer at the vet hospital (P.S. Welcome to the forum)
I have a 7yr old Lab that has suffered with a chronic cough since he was about the same age as your dog. He too has had all the tests, heart checks, and is extremely fit and active. The only thing the vets found when putting the camera down was chronic inflammation of his airways and white frothy mucus, lab tests came back clear for infections and lungworm. Lucan was started on steroid tablets which he didn't do well on, lost a lot of weight even on a very low dose and his coat was awful, so he was swapped over to an inhaler. Took a few weeks to train him but he's been using it for several years now. He can go days, sometimes a couple of weeks without coughing but then will have a bad few days when we up his inhaler to twice a day instead of once. He had a check up with the vet only this week and is very stable with no deterioration and a very healthy heart. Hope this gives you some reassurance.
One of our dogs had a mild cough for a week or so. We thought it was just a mild kennel cough as he had been vaccinated. He did become very ill, and ended up in doggy ITU. It was hard to diagnose the inhalation pneumonia, in the end he underwent a BAL procedure, a sort of advanced endoscopy to pinpoint the problem.
Hi , thanks for your information , this sounds exactly like what smudge has . When she was at the vets and knocked out the only 2 things that were discovered were the white frothy mucus and a slight enlargement hi , thanks for this , it sounds very similar to what the symptoms are with smudge . The vet did notice a slight enlargement of some of her smaller airways along with some white frothy mucus in her throat . She's basically been on steroids since day one so you'd think they would have done some good would you not . The strange thing was that when she returned home , from getting zonked out , she never coughed for around 38 -40 hours . I actually asked my vet if they had removed the mucus and she said no . Thanks again for your response . Much appreciated .
Hi, I don't think Lucan's meds have done anything to stop his cough either, he seems to cough just the same as he did without them, but what they do do, is to stop the condition getting any worse. TBH it's good that they do cough as it's getting rid of the excess mucus that would otherwise be causing more damage and infections deep in the lungs. It's good if your dog can tolerate the steroid tablets as they're much cheaper than the inhaler. Lucan was down to just 5mg a day when he was on them but he looked absolutely awful!
it depends on whether the inhaler contains a steroid..or whether the inhaler is purely a bronchodilator. Steroids oral or inhaled are effective if there is some immuno mediated response triggering the cough..ie an allergen. So they work by suppressing the immune response to that allergen...therefore reducing the amount of frothy type mucus created by the small and large airways so lessening the need to cough.
Yep Flixotide is a steroid only inhaler - contains Fluticasone. Common in human asthma treatment, though going a bit out of vogue now there are cheaper and possibly better steroid inhalers around. Seretide is a very common human inhaler that contains Flixotide along with a long-acting bronchodilator (a long acting version of ventolin/salbutamol)
