Why are Huskies hard to treat?

[mgklly]

Our Husky, Buzz developed epilepsy at 10 months and we have been told that he would be a hard case because he is a Husky. I also know someone else that has a Husky with epilepsy and they were told the same thing.
Buzz has proven to be hard to get his epilepsy under good control and after almost a year we are finally showing signs of improvement with many med increases and add ons.
I was just wondering why Huskies are said to be hard to treat, is it because of genetics?

[MK's mom]

I honestly don't know. I have heard that Shepherds are hard to control, too. Must be the way their brains are wired? Some dogs are harder to control than others. We had a man on the list with a Standard Poodle and that poor dog had it bad.

Vivian

[mgklly]

I have heard that about Shepards too. It would interesting to find out why. I was thinking it was either because they are a bigger breed or because they are a working breed and need more stimulation therefore more brain activity. I don't know if that makes sense or not, just curious.

[debs]

I have a shepherd and can attest to the fact that they are hard to treat. Her problem is that she is very sensitive to meds so the levels can't be too high or she really can't stand. Right now she takes 2 ml BID kbr (down from 3.1) and 100mgs PB BID. We just keep our fingers crossed from one week to the next. Best of luck with your husky! This really is a difficult thing to deal with.

[mgklly]

Well, Buzz seems to have the opposite problem. He is on very high doses of meds as they don't seem to affect/help him as well. We are finally starting to see improvement after many increases and adding KBr and increasing that. He sees the vet next week and they are thinking of increasing the KBr a little bit again as he is having less GM's since last increase but now is having focal seizures. They think that he is kind of right on the edge with the meds in that it is just barely holding off the gm's.
We use to have Buzz on valium after a seizure but we would have to give him so much that we thought for sure he would OD and it just made him really hyper so we switched to clonazepam. The vet even couldn't believe that the amount of valium he was taking didn't knock him out.

[richmauer]

Just an aside. I have an invisible fence for my three dogs and when it was installed, the guy said it would not work with Huskys! Maybe they have a strong tolerance for meds and pain.

My dog doesn't respond to valium either. Does the donazepam work?

[mgklly]

I could not imagine an invisible fence working for Buzz either, he runs so fast he would be through it before he felt anything.
We use clonazepam now and it works a lot better.