should i stop insulin, not sure ??

[Deb14]

hello,
first thanks for all your help you all are wonderful.

Quick hx. my cat is a diabetic due to steroids cause of IBD which resolved from raw diet. . She went into remission after 1 yr. so she's been off insulin for 6 mths. Her numbers (i test every few days to a week at most ) were no higher than 125 on average, one day was 135. She is on a raw high protein diet ( rad cat) and did wonderful.
But her recent check up on Jan 9th showed 2nd stage kidney insufficiency. So we started her on a kidney prescription diet plus taking Azodyl probiotic, but unfortunately her numbers jumped a bit due to the diet. Personally i think it jumps within 2 hrs of the Azodyl (which is a probiotic).
Her numbers fluctuate as high as 160 (rarely) and other days she's in the 140's on a cvs meter. My question what is the magic number. Because her number only stays high a few hrs then drops after a few hrs from taking the probiotic and food.

Her amount i am giving her is so minute..its literally 1/16 of a unit but it brings it down from 135-140 average to around 98-105. again there was a few times it was 165, but not very often. I really down mind giving her the insulin pretty easy , just concerned if she doesn't need it why put something synthetic in her body.. One of my vets internal medicine vet says stop unless it goes over 200 really i thought he was wrong and didnt really get into a discussion with me.

I can take her bs after 4hrs and 6 hrs dos ee what it is. I sued to do that when i was trying to get her in remission.
look forward to hearing from you.

take care and thank u
Debbie

 

[JanetNJ]

I would continue with the tiny doses for a while just to increase her chances of staying in remission. Remember on a human meter the numbers run lower. Normal numbers on a human meter are like 60-120. when you say she starts in the 140's and it drops after a few hours, what is it dropping to?

 

[Nan & Amber (GA)]

As Janet says, the longer you can keep her on the microdose, the better the chance for a strong remission-- it's always harder to get that remission to stick the second time around, I'm afraid if you were to stop the insulin now the numbers would go back up very quickly.

I'm actually wondering if maybe she'd do even better with a slightly larger dose for a while-- maybe 0.25U? It is hard to really say without a full spreadsheet to look at, but from your description she is mostly spending time between 100-150 on a human meter. That's good, but a bit above the real pancreas-healing numbers, which may be part of why you're "stuck" where you are.

Just a thought, dunno if it makes sense to do that in context of the whole history.

 

[Wendy&Neko]

Another thought, your vet is a little out of date with food for CKD cats, especiallly if only stage two. I would ditch the kidney food and find some nice low phosphorus raw food for her. The Radcat lamb is a good option. You want high quality protein with low phosphorus at this stage. For more on feeding CKD kitties, check out: http://www.felinecrf.org/diet_and_nutrition.htm

By the way, I never found the Azodyl impacted Neko's numbers. It's the high carb kidney diet that is probably doing it. If you get rid of it, maybe you can stop insulin.