Thursday, November 24, 2011

Helping Your Pet Deal with Its Dog Allergies

By Penny Driver


If you've spotted that your dog's coat has patches of swelling, and that your dog can't stop panicking its paws, chewing and licking, you'll have a serious case of atopy in your dog to address. One of the first things you must disqualify when you see your dog consistently troubling its coat is flea allergy dermatitis, naturally. But when you have ruled that out as a possible reason for why your dog keeps scratching itself, you might conceivably begin to consider dog allergies that come from mould, pollen or even dust inhalation or prejudice to a specific dog food brand.

Your first recourse here is perhaps be in a tar shampoo or a topical balm. That should look after the swelling. Your next concern of course is doing something about the itching that leads to all the scratching. There are shampoos available that ease the skin enough to help your dog stop scratching and start the recovery process.

If all of this does nothing and the dog allergies seem to continue, your vet will kick off the process of allergy testing, a concerned and lengthy process that may involve all sorts of tests that attempt to focus on the source of your dog's Problems. Your physician will generally first begin with the ELISA blood tests to look for antibodies in the blood that are a sure sign of an allergic reaction. It's also rather common to utilise a RAST blood test an identical reason.

The blood test looks for all sorts of allergenic substances, things in your dog's environment that might get a unfavourable reaction going - dust, mold, pollen, pretty much anything that is known to set dog allergies off. Of course, these are tests that were initially developed to help humans. How effective they'll be working on dogs depends upon luck usually.

Your doctor can also go with a more correct test - something you've seen utilized in humans to. It's called intradermal skin test. The vet shaves off a little area of your dog's coat and injects a small amount of some suspected antigen under the skin. If the skin right there begins to react pretty shortly, the vet knows what the reason for the dog's Problems is. Doctors customarily zero in on the allergy which has the blame more times than not with this sort of testing. Once the dog's allergies have been identified, it could be a pretty simple trail from this point on forward. You just make absolutely certain that your dog does not come by any of the suspected antigens in the course of its day, and your dog should be fine.




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