[music plays] [no dialogue] >>Kelly Runyon: We're talking about allergic skin disease on this week's Paw Report.

Dr. Gregory Mauck from the Kaskaskia Valley Animal Hospital says this is the number one issue his clinic is dealing with these days.

Stay with us as we explore some changes happening in the treatment and management of pet allergies.

The Paw Report starts now.

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Thanks for joining us, and thank you to Dr. Gregory Mauck for joining us on this episode of the Paw Report.

He comes to us from the Kaskaskia Valley Animal Hospital.

So, thank you so much for joining us.

And today we're talking about common causes of allergies in dogs and cats.

It's a very interesting topic, and as we mentioned, it's one of the top ailments that you see come through your clinic.

And I would have never guessed that.

So, we'll start with what is the most common allergies that you see?

And there's probably a difference in dogs and cats, I would assume, but maybe not.

>>Dr.

Mauck: Yeah.

Really, kind of deal with three different types of allergies.

Things we think of as inhalant or airborne type allergens, flea allergies, and food allergies.

So, those are kind of the three main things.

The airborne stuff is the most common, and it sometimes causes disease, kind of like people: runny eyes, sneezing, red eyes, that type of thing.

So, we do see that.

Hay fever-y type stuff.

But dogs and cats both tend to react to their allergens in their skin.

So, people are mainly respiratory reactors; dogs and cats are mainly skin reactors.

It's the same disease, but it just, where odes it show up.

Food allergens, that comes from, you know, sometimes obviously you would eat.

And it's proteins in the food.

It can be anything.

It can be, you know, beef, chicken protein, wheat, whatever.

Anything that you eat can cause an allergy.

And again, presents itself as a skin thing for the most part.

Flea allergies are super common.

They are probably the most easy to diagnose because they have a very specific look about them.

We have animals come in that you would not, cannot see a flea on them, the owner swears they have never seen a flea, and yet they have typical signs of flea allergies.

And we know they have a flea allergy.

But it only takes one flea to bite them to set them off for two weeks.

And so, you don't have to have a big flea problem to have a big flea allergy problem.

>>Kelly Runyon: You said you can see it right off the bat.

How do you, I mean what's the detector?

Is it spots on the skin, is it bite marks, I mean?

>>Dr.

Mauck: Flea allergy is the, like I say, is probably the easiest one.

So, if your dog's scratching and chewing, and you look, go to his tail, where his tail attaches to his body, to the tail head, and put your hand right there above that tail and look under it, if there's itch, scabby stuff there, that's always a flea allergy.

Matter of fact, one of our journals came out a couple years ago with a bunch of dermatologists as an allergy round table, and they were just discussing things.

And one of them made that point, and they all agreed with it, that that's a simple thing to do, is just go to the tail head, put your hand down, look under it.

If there's problems there, it's always fleas.

>>Kelly Runyon: Why there?

You would think around the face or neck.

>>Dr.

Mauck: Right, and you could have flea allergies elsewhere, but that's just the classic spot.

So, when we look at itchy dogs, one thing, we kind of look at where are you itching, and that tells us quite a bit right off the bat.

And if it's there, we pretty much know it's flea allergy.

The other allergens, the airborne, pollens, molds, all that stuff, and the food allergies, those look pretty much alike.

And the itchy spots for those are gnawing and chewing at the feet, which is the most common one.

So, owners will see their dogs just chewing at their feet, licking between their toes, doing all that thing.

Rubbing the face, ear problems, just kind of your general scratching at the side, that type of stuff.

But the feet, the face, and the ears are the biggies for the airborne and the food allergy.

But that's a problem with those two things, because if you have a dog chewing, scratching in those areas, then the next question is, well is this airborne stuff, or is it food stuff.

>>Kelly Runyon: Yeah, how would you determine what it is?

Did my dog eat something, did he, you know?

>>Dr.

Mauck: And that's a huge problem, because we don't know just by looking at them what's causing that.

So, most of the time we treat these things symptomatically.

And airborne allergens tend to respond fairly well to simple treatments.

Food allergies don't, but you can have food allergies that do and airborne things that don't.

So, that doesn't tell you.

But if we treat them in a simple manner, and they respond really well, they probably just are allergic to something in the environment.

And so, you know, in those situations, unless you want to move to Arizona or somewhere and get away from whatever they're allergic to around here, ragweed, corn, you know, just on, maple pollen, whatever, you know, you just kind of have to deal with it.

>>Kelly Runyon: Are more, are certain breeds more prone to allergens than others?

And what about cats?

>>Dr.

Mauck: Speaking of cats first, we get with cats, they're definitely less allergic than dogs.

They get some different forms of allergies.

Very itch, scabby things all over their body, little tiny scabs; it's called miliary dermatitis.

And you can get miliary dermatitis from things that aren't allergies.

It's just a reaction pattern of the skin.

So, with cats it's a little more difficult.

In cats, they say about 70% of allergic dermatitises are due to fleas, and then the other 30% would be airborne stuff and food allergies, things like that.

But a cat definitely, as far as diagnostically trying to figure it out, is more difficult.

But as far as dog breeds go, certain breeds like schnauzers, 90% of them get allergies.

So if you say hey, I'd like a schnauzer, and you go get a schnauzer puppy, then you need to plan that your'e going to have allergy problems.

Very likely; some schnauzers don't.

It's just genetics.

It's kind of been bred into the breed.

All breeds of dogs have their problems.

You know, to make breeds, we have to inbreed.

And so, then things pop up.

So, certain breeds have problems with orthopedic issues.

And unfortunately for schnauzers, one of the things that's been bred into them is a propensity to develop allergic dermatitis.

All the terriers are, have a lot of allergies in general.

You know, you take labs; we'll see some, but they're not a particularly allergic breed.

So, you know, a lot of bigger dogs, if we see allergies, they tend to be flea allergies are more common.

We'll get the others.

But I have a lab I think of off the top of my head who has absolutely horrible allergies.

>>Kelly Runyon: And can a dog, and I don't mean to interrupt, can a dog get food borne allergies, can it get inhalant allergies, can it get a flea allergy; can it get all of them?

>>Dr.

Mauck: Yes, it can get all of them, which is really annoying.

One of the first things we do with all allergies is say, are you on good flea control?

Because, that, even if you have, a lot of itchy dogs have multiple things that are causing itchiness.

So, you have some allergies, have some fleas, have some staph infection on top of it.

A real common thing we get with allergies is, because allergies mess up your skin metabolism and things, and it causes inflammation and excess oil production.

And so, then the normal things that live on the skin, the staphs and yeast that just live there, then grow out of control.

And so, we'll get dogs with allergies that have secondary yeast infections, secondary staph infections, too.

And then, that throws a whole new wrinkle to the itchiness.

So, we have to treat all of that.

>>Kelly Runyon: Are allergies seasonal?

I mean, will a dog have, if a dog is allergic, is a dog allergic?

Or can these come and go when the seasons come and go?

>>Dr.

Mauck: ...Yeah, it definitely comes and goes.

Some dogs, they'll show up in May, say they show up May 15, and they're scratching and itching.

And I look at their record.

Last year they were here May 10, the year before they were here May 18.

Because, whatever they're allergic to blooms at that point in time, or it's a tree that pollenates at that point in time, and that's what they're allergic to.

And bam.

A lot of dogs, the big, major allergy season's the fall.

The biggest allergens we have around here, the same things that drive people crazy: ragweed, corn pollen, all that.

So, when all of that stuff starts hitting in July, July to November's the worst time of the year for allergies.

Some dogs only react in the spring because they're allergic to tree pollens that tend to be common then.

Some dogs only react in the winter because they're allergic to the house dust mite, and those are most apt to be floating around in the air in the dry winter.

So, but some dogs have, are allergic to trees in the spring, corn in the summer, ragweed in the fall, house dust mites in the winter.

And so, it's a huge, you know, that dog may be having problems year round.

>>Kelly Runyon: Is there anything considered a hypoallergenic dog?

>>Dr.

Mauck: Well no, not for the most part.

But there are just certain breeds we don't see a lot of allergies with.

But you could mention any breed, and I can think, come back through my head and think of one that had it.

But, like poodles for example, I don't tend to see a lot of allergic poodles, you know.

And then some of the larger breed dogs we don't tend to see as many of.

But it's, any breed can get it, but there are certain breeds, like I said, if you get a schnauzer or certain terriers, you know, you're probably going to have it.

You know, so, it's kind of one of those things.

>>Kelly Runyon: Is frequent bathing, you know, I think a lot of people, I was always told, I have labs, and I was always told, oh you don't bathe them very frequently.

And I have other friends that bathe their animals all the time.

And so, is that a help or a hindrance?

>>Dr.

Mauck: It's actually very helpful with allergies.

How allergies work, you know, when we talk about pollens, they don't actually inhale them.

Now, when I was back in school in the dark ages, in the early 80s, they were telling us that they inhaled the pollens, they penetrated in the blood stream, circulated around, and reacted in the skin.

Well, that was totally wrong.

What actually happens is, now, and hopefully they won't change this, they're pretty sure of this, they get on the skin and actually penetrate through the skin.

And so, the animals that tend to be allergic are ones that have skin that's more easily penetrated.

I know, at the office I use my tile floor as an example.

My tiles will be skin cells, and between the skill cells, like the grout, there's stuff between your skin cells that kind of act like grout between tiles.

Well, animals that tend to have allergies, they think have grout that's not very good to your skin, so it allows the pollens when they get on there to actually penetrate between the skin cells and get in under the skin, where then the white blood cell that's there, the white blood cell, the mast cell, then reacts to that.

Mast cells are the key to all allergens for the most part.

They're a tissue white blood cell that reacts to these foreign things that get in there.

So, we have mast cells in our gut, your respiratory lining, and your skin.

And so, with inhalant allergies, you inhale those pollens, and they penetrate into your respiratory lining.

The mast cells react to them, dump all their nasty chemicals, and you have sneezing, red eyes, runny nose, and all that.

So, the skin, the same thing happens.

Those things penetrate, the white blood cell reacts to it, releases all his inflammatory chemicals, causes all this itchiness.

So, that's really what's going on with allergies with those air, we tend to try to call them airborne allergens, not inhalant things.

Because, even though there are some inhalant problems, it's mainly landing on them.

So, with shampooing, if you shampoo regularly, you can wash those off before they have time to penetrate, and that can be super helpful to a dog that has atopic dermatitis, that atopy, which is the penetrating pollen allergy.

>>Kelly Runyon: Can you talk about some more the signs, some of the more obvious signs: itching and scratching, and you mentioned water eyes.

But I'd have to believe that there's probably other warning signs out there that pet owners need to know, and not let it go on.

And maybe you can address that, too.

If somebody lets this go on untreated, some of the things that could happen.

>>Dr.

Mauck: Right.

Yeah, of course the number one issue is itchiness.

And so, you know, if the dog is scratching enough, it's driving you and him crazy, then it's too much.

And we have some dogs come in, I mean they have destroyed their skin scratching.

And they can do it overnight.

Just scratch, scratch, scratch, scratch, scratch, chew, chew, chew, disrupt the top layer of the skin.

And then, it starts weeping serum out, it gets secondarily infected.

So, we'll have dogs come in.

And this, you know, it's not the people are not watching; I mean, this literally can happen overnight.

They'll wake up the next morning, and their dog's got a sore on them this big around.

And it's commonly called a hot spot, and it's where they've been lick, lick, lick, and they've just disrupted the top layer of the skin.

It starts weeping serum out, irritates all, and just starts spreading across there.

So, that's a big thing there.

>>Kelly Runyon: Indicator.

>>Dr.

Mauck: Yeah.

And it's just miserable.

A lot of times, dogs show up with allergies, and the owner's, well I know he's been itching, but the main reason's they're there is because the dog's not eating.

And they're like, why is my dog not eating?

Well, then it turns out the dog's not eating because he's just miserable from allergies.

He's just constantly itching, scratching, and he just feels miserable.

And he just like, eh, I don't even care about eating, I'm so scratchy, itchy, miserable.

So, sometimes it's kind of odd symptoms we see.

Rarely, you can have GI symptoms with allergies, where they're reacting from pollens and things they're swallowing, or food allergens, that type of thing.

But the secondary infections can get really severe with the yeast, the staph, that type of stuff.

And the dogs that are prone to yeast and staph, it's not necessarily that the allergy causes them, it's just that that whole mechanism of having that top layer of their skin that's not impervious to pollens, well it's also not impervious to staph organisms and yeast and stuff like that that wants to get set up into the skin, start growing.

So, that's really another huge issue we deal with.

With the ears, when we get allergies in the ears, and they'll actually swell shut.

I had a dog the other day, his ear canal was completely swollen shut.

And I couldn't even get a scope in there to even look in there because it was so tightly swollen.

So, if you do that to your ear, you can't let any heat, moisture out, the bacteria and things that just normally live in your ear just explode.

You know, now we have pus coming out of the ear, the dog's digging at it, ruptures a blood vessel in their ear.

You know, so a lot of problems like that can occur.

So, you know, if we've got a really itchy dog, really need to get on top of it before, because they can do a lot of damage to themselves.

And it's just miserable.

I just can't imagine sitting around with my entire body itching constantly, scratching.

>>Kelly Runyon: Are there cures?

>>Dr.

Mauck: Well, not real good ones.

Because, one thing we say, it's like, okay, my dog's allergic; what's he allergic to?

Can you do a test and tell me what he's allergic to?

Does that help?

And yes and no.

The gold standard for testing for allergies in dogs, like people, is doing all the little injections and see what you're allergic to.

Well, you're only going to do that if you're going to try to desensitize to those things.

And the desensitization just doesn't work real well.

It can have some effect, but it just, I never have seen real great results with it.

You know, and that's something you have to go to a specialty dermatology clinic, like the U of I or something, and have done.

But I've had people do that; haven't seen great results.

So, that would, something that would purport to actually cure allergies, to stop the actual allergic reaction to it.

You can also do blood tests for allergens.

Those really don't work at all.

I just saw an article just recently, because it would be nice, hey we'll take a blood test, see what you're allergic to, and desensitize you.

Well, in this study, and this just was something I saw within a month or so ago, they took blood samples from a dog, three different samples, sent it to three different labs, and of course got three completely different results back.

And so, most, when I read about, you know, dermatologists actually writing about stuff, they don't recommend doing blood tests for allergens at all.

So, we don't do those.

The main treatment for allergens for the most part is to treat the, treat them symptomatically.

And that entails steroids, usually.

Antihistamines can be helpful sometimes.

Any given antihistamine works in about 10% of the dogs it's used in.

So, if you say, well I'm going to try Benadryl.

Well, you have about a 10% chance of it working, which if it does, that's great.

It's super safe.

But for the most part, antihistamines are not super helpful.

They can help, but for the most part, we're using steroids to stop it.

For short term, we do what's called pulse therapy, where we hit them and then get off of it.

We do have a new treatment.

That's one thing I wanted to talk about specifically.

That has just come out this year that has, it's going to change the way that we treat allergies significantly.

It's a non-steroidal type thing.

Steroids can have a lot of side effects.

And so, we're careful with them.

They're kind of like fire; they work great, but you can get burned by them.

This new drug's called Apoquel, and it's actually related to the drugs used for people for rheumatoid arthritis and things.

But it's a slightly different form of it.

It doesn't, it works a little differently.

Super safe.

Those drugs can be touchy in, you know, they're sometimes needed, can have severe side effects.

This drug can be given for the long term and is super safe.

The problem with it is the company that made it didn't anticipate how huge it would be, and I don't know why, since allergies are basically the number one thing we deal with, and it's in extremely limited supply probably for the next year.

So, we're only able to use it in very limited numbers of cases.

But as it becomes more available, it's going to be a huge drug.

And the dogs we've used it in were dogs that were just, we just couldn't get the itching under control, and have put them on... One of them was this lab I was mentioning that's so severe.

He's done really well with it.

So, we've put them on these tough cases that were resistant to steroids, and they've done really well.

But we're just limited on what we can get, and so... >>Kelly Runyon: And it's on all platforms of the allergy that this works on.

>>Dr.

Mauck: Yeah, it seems to be.

We've had real good luck with it, so.

>>Kelly Runyon: So, other cures.

Other things pet owners can do and look out for.

>>Dr.

Mauck: Yeah, number one thing is flea control.

It's the first thing.

>>Kelly Runyon: Will they still have flea allergies if they're given the topical flea medicine?

>>Dr.

Mauck: They can, but it just, the amount of it it's going to cut way down.

Even if they're taking flea control, and they're doing really well, they still can get bitten by the occasional flea.

Nothing works perfectly.

But getting one bite vs. 50 makes a huge difference in how much allergies.

And in developing; if you start out on your flea control from puppyhood, and that dog never is exposed to a lot of fleas, he probably will never get flea allergies.

He might, but the more exposure to fleas, the more likely you're going to get flea allergy.

>>Kelly Runyon: And it's the saliva in the flea that causes this, correct?

Because when a flea, well you can talk about it, but when a flea bites, the saliva goes into the system, and that's when they start taking the meal out, which would be the blood.

>>Dr.

Mauck: Yes, it's anti-coagulant.

It stops the blood from clotting.

They inject that in there, and it helps them keep drinking.

But then, the protein that's in that escapes into the system, and the dog reacts to it.

It's very allergenic.

So, flea control's number one thing.

Number two is the bathing you talked about.

That's a simple thing you can do at home.

They did a study a few years ago, when they were first figuring out, hey they're not inhaling them, they're penetrating.

So, they did this study with dogs, and they took two groups of dogs that had allergies and didn't do anything with one group.

And of course, a month later they were still the same itchy level.

The other group, the only thing they did was hose them off once a day outside.

So, they had the owner take them out, hose them off.

Not even bathe them, just hose them off.

>>Kelly Runyon: Just water.

>>Dr.

Mauck: Uh huh.

And at the end of 30 days, that group, their itchiness score had dropped by half.

And so then, that was just from rinsing the pollens off before they had time to react.

So, if you use good quality shampooing and things, that can be real helpful to keep pollens, molds, and things off, and also keep the counts of staph down on the skin, the malassezia yeast that we fight with all the time, to keep those things down on the skin also.

So, bathing's another, you know, thing that's overlooked a lot.

And you can bathe dogs.

The old wive's tale about not bathing dogs, you know, maybe 50 years ago they had, you know, low quality things that really stripped the oils off the dog and caused problems.

But if you get a good dog shampoo now, they really have, they're very low detergent; they don't take the oils off so much, but they clean the dog.

So, if you use a good dog shampoo, you can bathe them pretty often.

And if they seem to be getting a little dry, you can do a cream rinse or a bath oil afterwards, that type of thing for them.

So, I have some people that have house dogs that bathe them two or three times a week, and they just want them clean, you know.

>>Kelly Runyon: Well, some great information today.

And a very, a learning experience for me.

I didn't know quite as much about, I would have never guessed that the number one issue in a vet office is allergens.

>>Dr.

Mauck: Yeah.

It's a huge one.

We could do an entire season of Paw Report on allergies.

>>Kelly Runyon: Well, thank you so much for joining us.

And we thank you for joining us for another episode of the Paw Report.

We'll see you next time.

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Production for the Paw Report is made possible by: Inyart Tire and Auto Center, in Charleston and Mattoon.

Inyart offers complete auto repair.

Inyart Tire and Auto Center cares about our community and thanks you for being a responsible pet owner.

More information at Inyart.com.

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