Incontinence - Low Purine Diet?

[blissirritated]

Has anyone had any success with controlling urinary incontinence with a low purine diet and restricting water intake (taking away access to water an hour or two before 'bed time')?

[Poodle wrangler]

Sorry, am not sure, but I'd be going straight for the medications.

There's a couple of different ones the vet can prescribe.

Certainly wouldn't hurt to limit water just before bedtime.

I'm guessing you've already done the basics like have the urine checked for a urinary tract infection?

[blissirritated]

Thanks anyway PW.

She's been cleared of a UTI and been given the onceover by the vet who said "she's in perfect health, it's probably just incontinence" and then charged me $84 for a bottle of Propalin. The same vet couldn't tell me what she thought had caused it, couldn't explain what the Propalin actually did or how it worked...

Basically I came back feeling very defeated and flitted about on the internet looking at alternatives/causes/side effects of Propalin. Read somewhere that a low purine diet could help and it clicked that on Tuesday and Thursday nights (both nights she's been 'wetting the bed') she had a diet of food that was unusually (for her) 'high in purine'.

She'll only be 4 this Christmas and I just think she's too young to go straight onto a lifetime of drugs without giving anything else some thought. Obviously if she gets worse or becomes distressed I'll be ramming the drugs into her quicker than she can blink , but she's young so I wanted to give a more 'management' based approach a try first. It's only happened twice so far (Tuesday/Thursday) so I'm prepared to test a few things out (provided she isn't too distressed in the meantime) before I put her onto medication without knowing the 'exact' reason why.

Just wanted to ask the people here if they've tried the 'low purine' way or anything else.

(In hindsight I should have put all this in my original post ;) )

[Mizzi]

Thanks anyway PW.

She's been cleared of a UTI and been given the onceover by the vet who said "she's in perfect health, it's probably just incontinence" and then charged me $84 for a bottle of Propalin. The same vet couldn't tell me what she thought had caused it, couldn't explain what the Propalin actually did or how it worked...

Basically I came back feeling very defeated and flitted about on the internet looking at alternatives/causes/side effects of Propalin. Read somewhere that a low purine diet could help and it clicked that on Tuesday and Thursday nights (both nights she's been 'wetting the bed') she had a diet of food that was unusually (for her) 'high in purine'.

She'll only be 4 this Christmas and I just think she's too young to go straight onto a lifetime of drugs without giving anything else some thought. Obviously if she gets worse or becomes distressed I'll be ramming the drugs into her quicker than she can blink , but she's young so I wanted to give a more 'management' based approach a try first. It's only happened twice so far (Tuesday/Thursday) so I'm prepared to test a few things out (provided she isn't too distressed in the meantime) before I put her onto medication without knowing the 'exact' reason why.

Just wanted to ask the people here if they've tried the 'low purine' way or anything else.

(In hindsight I should have put all this in my original post )

I have a 2 year old border collie x kelpie that developed an incontinence problem when she was about 10 months old. My vet couldn't find anything physically wrong with her but suggested it might be psychological, so she put her on a course of Pulsitilla drops (a homeopathic remedy). I also bought some Bladder biochemics (Schuessler Tissue Salts) from my local health food shop. It worked a treat. She still has the occasional bout of incontinence, but only when she goes into a deep sleep - usually in the sunshine. Basically, she is now an intermittent bed-wetter, something we have learned to deal with. If I find the problem is recurring more frequently, I just crush half a bladder pill in with her meal for a few days and she gets back on track again.

Hope this helps :-)

[Janba]

I have always fed my dalmatians a low purine diet (they can't metabolise purines) and have had desexed bitches who suffered urinary incontinence.

I have treated with stilbestrol (sp?) and also had some success with couch grass extract that I got from a herbalist. I found with the stilbestrol that I only had to give it for a short while at a time till the sphincter muisclres tightened.

[horus]

I'm currently treating one of my bitches (10 year old) for incontinence with Propalin and find it doesn't work 100% of the time, she will have bouts of incontinence while on Propalin. With the vets guidance we have tried various daily dosages and split that dose into smaller but more frequent rates throughout the day with varying degrees of success but still no real 100% effective solution. I was using the 100ml bottle (which I pay $70 for btw) but have changed to using the 30 ml bottles ($25) as it seemed that the incontinece reoccured towards the end of the bottle (low shelf life perhaps?).

So, I'm interested in reading other's comments on solutions, too. I started a thread on Propalin a little while ago and Molasseslass posted a link to herbal remedies that I looked at but never tried. I'll see if I can find the link.

Link in this thread:

http://www.dolforums.com.au/index.php?show...amp;hl=propalin

Link to product:

http://www.herbal-treatments.com.au/caninecondition.html#2

Edited October 28, 2007 by horus