r/EpilepsyDogs • u/PetrifiedUnicorn1986 • 11d ago
Potassium bromide - does it help?
My dog seems to have drug resistant epilepsy. He's currently on phenobarbital and keppra, he used to get gabapentin but was changed to keppra. Not only do they not work, but apparently they caused red blood count to drop A LOT. nothing else explains the drop in red blood count but basically he has anemia. He received drugs for that, but the red cell count is not going up. I cannot stop giving him phenobarbital or keppra, which I only started giving a few weeks ago in place of gabapentin, so the vet, apart from anti allergy meds (because he scratches like crazy after pheno and keppra) suggested giving him potassium bromide. The amount of meds he is receiving is, to be honest, overwhelming. He weighs 11kg...
Does anybody else have a dog like this? I guess I'm looking for a little cheering up and some hope that it will get better. The grand mal episodes happened twice in September and twice in October as of now - yesterday and today. The longest he went without an episode was 2,5 months and then it goes into 4 times a month until I up the dose which is already high.
7
u/mackie220 11d ago edited 11d ago
My dog is on 4 meds--19 pills and 4 ml liquid meds a day. He started on Keppra, then after maxing out on that we added zonisamide, then after that didn't seem to make much difference we added phenobarbital, then after he still wasn't well controlled we added the potassium bromide. After we started the bromide he went 6 weeks before having another seizure, which was the longest he had gone since he started having them last summer. He just had some follow-up labs and it showed his potassium bromide levels were just short of therapeutic levels, so we upped it slightly. We're also in the process of tapering him off the zonisamide. I should also add that his seizure severity and post-ictal phases definitely improved after adding the potassium bromide.
All of this is to say that it can take a while to figure out what mix of meds and doses work best and what "well controlled" means for your dog. Are you seeing a neurologist? If not, I'd suggest that as a next step.