I would love some advice about my 6 1/2 year old ferret Baby.  She was
diagosed early in the year with insulinoma, and has been on 1ml of
pediapred twice daily for about the past 6 months.  She has slowly been
over time had thinning hair on her belly and the backs of her legs.
Then I noticed that her body hair had gotten thinner, seems like the
under hairs aren't there, and you can see her skin through her hair if
you look for it.  Her backs of legs are now bare of hair, the lowest
part of her belly is sparse, but the rest of her has just maintained
that thinner than normal hair.

We suspected adrenal, although there were no other clinical signs of it.
The Tenn panel came back normal, and we did in ultrasound in which the dr
doing it said not only did he not see any tumors but that the adrenals
actually looked healthy (not his exact words, but the jist of it).
However, I know those aren't foolproof tests so my vet and I put her on
montly lupron to see if the hairloss would improve.

Baby has now had 4 monthly lupron shots at the 100 (mg/ml?) level and
there has been no improvement.  My vet doesn't do the melatonin implants
which often complement the lupron because she doens't feel there is proof
yet.  The first shot was in June and the most recent in Sept.  I'm
thinking we should stop the lupron since there is no improvement, but my
vet recommended going up to the 200 level before stopping.  I don't feel
comfortable increasing her dose when we don't even have any definate
signsf that she has adrenal.

I would really appreciate any thoughts or advice!

Risa

[Posted in FML 5384]