Curving Your Diabetic Dog Part 2

Today we talk about interpreting your curve results. Let’s briefly review curve shapes. They are Bowl Curve, Mountain Curve and Flat Curve.

There is a bowl curve where your fasting numbers (the numbers before each meal) are the highest numbers in your curve and the rest are lower. On paper they may look like this:

Next there is a Mountain Curve where your fasting numbers are the lowest numbers in your curve and the rest are higher. On paper it would look something like this:

That brings us to a “flat curve” where your numbers stay within 100-150 points throughout the entire 12 hours. It would look something like this:

Honestly, I have yet to find out what exactly determines curve shape except to say that the way your pup metabolizes food and absorbs insulin will determine the shape of your curve. There is no shape that is better or worse than the other. Some are certainly more convenient than another, but we get what we get. I’m sure that if we tried hard enough we could purposefully change curve shape, but why would we want to.

The point is that knowing what shape curve you have is valuable information. Why? Well if you work outside the home and your pup is alone most of the day and you have a bowl shaped curve, you may want to run your pup’s BG (Blood Glucose) a little higher than someone that has a mountain curve or a flat curve. Our primary goal is to be sure that our pups are safe always.

What do we do with this information? Good question! The purpose of a curve as I have said is to determine how your food and insulin are working together. In the beginning of your diagnosis, you curve once a week to see if you need more (or sometimes less) insulin to bring your pup’s numbers into a good range. The suggested safe range is 150-250. If your pup is still sighted, keeping him/her as close to 200 without running too low is optimal to protect their vision.

We want the full 12 hour curve because if we are going to increase an insulin dose, we have to keep in mind that lowering the higher numbers in the curve will also lower the lower numbers. We never, ever chase the high numbers! We base our dosing on the LOWEST number in the curve. I’ll say that again WE BASE OUR DOSE CHANGES ON THE LOWEST NUMBER IN THE CURVE! If you have an erratic curve, there are other tools in your tool belt besides insulin that can help smooth things out. So ALWAYS consider the lowest number in your curve before you do anything with insulin!

A good rule of thumb is that a full unit of insulin can bring your numbers down about 100 points, ½ a unit of insulin can bring your numbers down about 50 points. That said every dog is different so some may get more or less from each of those. The temptation here is to fast track your dose changes to get your numbers down as quickly as possible, resist that temptation!!! In larger dogs, we typically increase insulin in one units increments until you get close to being “in range” (150-250), then we increase by ½ unit increments to fine tune. In smaller dogs, we typically increase by ½ a unit at a time throughout the whole “regulation” process.

After any dose increase you must wait a MINIMUM of 6 doses (3 days) to begin to see how the change in dose affects your numbers. Ideally we wait a full 7 days to let the new dose settle and curve again to see the new complete picture. In rare cases, you could re-evaluate after the 6 doses, but waiting the full week to let the dose settle fully is ideal.

Slow and steady is the only way to find your ideal dose to manage this disease. In or next post, we will explore what happens when you go too fast…

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Until next time…