Addison's Disease
Bo, my 6-year-old Rottweiller was diagnosed with Addison's disease a year and a half ago. He needs to take Florinef and prednisone every day for the rest of his life. Due to his large size, he needs to take eleven Florinef a day. Are there other alternatives to Florinef which may be less expensive?
Hypoadrenocorticism, more commonly known as Addison's disease, is a disease of the adrenal glands in which the adrenal glands no longer produce adequate amounts of a number of different hormones. Fortunately, hormone replacement therapy and careful follow-up with your regular veterinarian usually results in an excellent long-term prognosis. Florinef is the most commonly recommended therapy for Addison's disease. Unfortunately, as you have seen with Bo, this medicine can be quite expensive.
To try and reduce this expense, you should contact a number of different pharmacies in the area to check on their prices for Florinef. You may find significant variation between pharmacies in their pricing which could add up to considerable savings. Dr. Wise is not aware of any generic brand of Florinef, but there is a recently licensed product for Addison's disease known as DOCP (Percorten™) which may prove to be less expensive than Florinef, especially for a large dog such as yours. Your veterinarian administers this product by injection once monthly. In Bo's case this should make things considerably easier than getting 11 pills a day into him! Bo will probably still need to be on prednisone and have follow-up exams as before with your veterinarian. Discuss this with your veterinarian and see if he/she thinks Bo would be a good candidate for this treatment.
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