Navre wrote:Tanya had quite a day today. I got a call from the vet that her test results were back, and that her high cholesterol is a result of LDL cholesterol. They are prescribing .5 ml of Cholestyramine once
a day. I went down to Angell to pick up her meds, about a 2 hour round tip. In that time Tanya managed to tangle herself all up in a string from one of the flannel sheets she was sleeping on. It took a while to untangle her. I'm going to start her on her new med tomorrow. She's been through enough today. I'm only using the fleece from on. She has been pulling apart the flannel and it's just not worth the risk. The flannel was under the fleece, for absorbancy, but she managed to pull it out.
Has the doctor ever prescribed cholestyramine to other parrots and gotten good results in lowering the blood cholesterol levels? Because I researched about it and could not find any reference of it been used with pet parrots... This is, of course, your decision but, in case you had not done any research about it, I did and this is what I found:
The only avian studies I could find that gave serum cholesterol levels were these:
1)
http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script= ... 0000100015 and they found no lowering of the levels with it (the study was actually more like an experiment to see if they could feed it to hens and thereby reduce the amount of cholesterol in the eggs they produced but they tested serum cholesterol, too).
2)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ar ... 1963800836 This one was on atherosclerosis on pigeons with high cholesterol and fast thyroid but it also found that the drug had no effect on cholesterol levels.
3) I also found this one which did not mention cholesterol at all but found that it inhibited absorption of dietary MTDs and LTDs in chicks:
http://link.springer.com/article/10.100 ... ccess=true4) and there is a trial going on to use it to treat cormorans poisoned by red algae but there are no results on it yet:
http://www.morrisanimalfoundation.org/v ... oaytI-cHmII have to tell you, I don't like treating parrots with medicines that are not proven to work on them. Now, granted that few medicines are actually approved for them so somebody's bird needs to be the guinea pig... it's only that I rather it wasn't one of mine. I would much rather treat with natural supplements and diet than give them unproven medicines... Which reminds me that I was thinking about Tanya yesterday as I was working on a diet and treatment for the new sun conure and could not remember whether I had told you to treat her with methionine and choline - did I? Because they are always part of my initial detox treatment, especially with fatty liver.
Just my two cents.
You should see people yelping, jumping on one foot first and then the other and trying to back off all at the same time when Freddie goes for their feet! What they don't realize is that it's their reaction that makes him go after them and that if they would only calmly put their hand down when he first touches their feet, he would step up without a problem.
