ProZinc Users?

So, we only have 1/2 vile of PZI Vet left. My vet has given me the choice of ProZinc or Lantus and I think I am going to go with ProZinc. Any one have any experiences or stories to share?

 

There were some (at least 2, I think) people who had switched to ProZinc. I've been away for a week so I haven't kept up with things. If I remember correctly, though, Gator and H switched, and we had another couple of newer people who were started on ProZinc. I'm sorry I don't remember more details than that, but keep posting and checking back. It seems to work VERY similarly to PZI, so I think you are going to be fine with it.

 

We switch to ProZinc a few weeks ago on a 1:1 dosing. The switch went fine. We are not the best test case though as H has so many other issues and an appetite that fluctuates.

However, lately his numbers have been up and down. So I am starting to take more numbers. I won't know for a while what his curves look like. All I know right now is that I'm glad I dose on a sliding scale. But I've always been glad for that - H's appetite can fluctuate on a dime and give me fits keeping him in good territory.

I've been told the research shows that ProZinc should be a mirror image of PZI Vet.

I am a firm believer that PZI is best for the appetite challenged cat.

Rread the posts in the old forum about ProZinc - you will get more info.

 

Cody started insulin in Aug o7. He has been on Humulin N, then? , then vetsulin a long time, and in Nov 09 we started a compounded PZI, then 2 1/2 weeks ago we started Pro Zinc.

I just posted a lot of data from the last 2 months comparing his numbers on PZI vs Prozinc. I'm not sure the Prozinc data is a totally fair comparison, because we had a lot of chaos over the last 2 weeks which messed up a lot of days, so stop back again. I also dropped the bottle, twice! In general, he is much more level, with lower numbers more often, and a lot lower dose, than on Vetsulin. I think the Prozinc is pretty similar to the PZI

Check his spreadsheet-- as a newbie, I'm pretty proud I managed to add it!

 

Nancy & Cody

Hi Nancy,
Welcome to PZI Land, I haven't seen you here before. Congrats on getting your spreadsheet up. I guess you need to keep Cody out of the pie. ;-) If you're like us, all of those sweets are gone now that the holidays are over. What kind of food does Cody eat? Have you switched him to low-carb canned? His dose - 4 units - seems high, but I can't talk, Blackie has been between 2 and 3 units for several months now. Hope you'll post more often and tell us more about you.

 

Hi Nancy, and welcome to PZI! You did great on getting your SS up. I see that Cody likes pie. I can't blame him.

Please do tell us more about yourself and keep posting regularly. We're small but we're fun! At least we like to think so. :lol:

 

Hi Everybody!
Ya Cody is quite the SNEAKY and Fast little guy when it comes to stalking the kitchen. We all try SO hard, but with the chaos of the holidays he got into pecan pie, chocolate frosting and a little cake, leftovers out of the covered trash and the styrofoam it came in, over half of 2 beefsteak tomatoes yes, TOMATOES, dry dog food, crumbs of anything off the floor, and who knows what else. My counters are completely empty, so we caught him climbing the wire shelves in my pantry! Yikes :roll:

anyway I have written a novel about him in the health section. please check it out:
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=839
if that doesn't work, its a topic called "diabetic 3 years high dose,(Nancy and Cody)" which a moderator split off from another newbie topic I posted to.

and yes he's on canned only. DM changed their recipe this fall, took the corn gluten out of their recipe finally. I've tried a lot of different foods and just got too confused with so many variables and his sugar never really came down. my vetsulin readings were all over the map, but never, ever below ~150. He's also on several meds for heart and megacolon. anyway I'm repeating myself, go take a look at the topic above or maybe I could cut and paste into a profile.
( my next task )
He was actually on 13 units of vetsulin BID, at one time, so 4 seemed good, until I started reading this board the last week or so...
Thanks for the welcome! cat_pet_icon

 

My goodness, poor hungry Cody! And poor you! You certainly seem to be dealing with a lot; I went and read the thread on Health. It sounds like you're doing a bang-up job, though, and he certainly looks happy. What a sweet boy (assuming he is in your avatar pic, and that the other one is TF).

13u, wow!! I can see how 4 would seem awesome after that. And who knows, maybe it is the right dose for him. I know that the people in High Dose will be able to answer your questions regarding that, and hopefully we can answer your questions regarding PZI. The ProZinc-ers are slowly struggling in, but as of right now, there's one active, regular person here who is using ProZinc and that is Gator & H.

Again, welcome, and thanks for stopping by! We look forward to seeing you more often.

 

Buddha was on Vetsulin for a year and half until he went DKA in November 2009. The emergency vet who brought him back from death became his new vet. Her approach to treatment is much more aggressive than the old vet (who told me that bg levels high point 500/low point 300 where just fine for a diabetic cat). The new vet initially put him on 5u bid of Vetsulin, which resulted in a hypo on Thanksgiving Day. She switched him to ProZinc and advised me to give him 2u bid. She retested him again a couple weeks later and upped the dose to 3u bid, just before the Christmas holidays. I followed advice for a week or so, until we went on vacation. I instructed the pet sitter to give 2.5u bid, just to be extra safe while we were gone. I came back just over a week later. I noticed that Buddha had started peeing quite a bit again, though he looked and acted just fine. But I took that as a sign that he really did need 3u bid. However, after a few days at 3u bid, he hypoed again, this time acting lethargic, and totally didn't react to the ear prick, etc. However, when I grabbed a can of food and the maple syrup he hopped right up and followed me to his dish and gobbled everything up.

So I am bg testing more again, and his numbers are all over the place and I just don't understand what is going on. Buddha eats fancy feast exclusively now, 4 cans a day, from the nonfish varieties listed on the gluten free page. And also, sometimes at bedtime if his numbers are/were lower then I give him some dry Wellness Core and I still worry that I'll wake up in the morning and he'll be dead of hypo.

I do test bg, sporadically, see his spreadsheet. But unless the numbers are extreme I don't know how to interpret them. I'm much better at ear pricks then I used to be (warm ears make all the difference!) and he is getting much better at getting his paw up at just the wrong time to splatter that little drop all over.

I would love to have a ProZinc support group.

 

Donna & Buddha

Welcome, Donna. I hope we see you here more often. Even if it doesn't look like it, this is the ProZinc help group. Please feel free to post your questions and concerns. There haven't been that many of us here, but now that ProZinc is becoming more popular, we are seeing more people. I looked at your spreadsheet and Wow! it is hard to intrepret. I don't have any advice except to try to get more spot checks. I know it's stressful, but sometimes the extra data can help you know what to do when your kitty throws you a curve. And it looks like Buddha is throwing you curves all the time. ;-) Hopefully you won't have any more hypo experiences.

 

Hi Donna, and welcome! It sounds like you and Buddha have been through quite a bit on this FD journey. He is gorgeous, by the way; I love the white paws.

You said you would love a ProZinc support group; here we are! Not many of us are using ProZinc yet, but the #s are slowly building. So far, from our limited case study of one (Gator & H), it seems to work quite similarly to PZI. My vet confirmed yesterday that her clients also say that it works like Idexx PZI as well. The dosing seems to be 1:1 (again, in the limited knowledge that we have). Gator has typed up some thoughts on ProZinc so far, as they relate to his kitty. You might want to read those and see what you think.

It is possible that Buddha's correct dose is somewhere between 2.5u and 3u and you missed it when going back and forth between those two. It's also possible that both doses are too high and he's experiencing rebound, particularly on the 3u. What kind of syringes are you using? Do they have a red cap or an orange cap? It is possible to use syringes that allow you to dose smaller doses because they have half-unit markings. ProZinc is a U-40 insulin, and if you use U-100 syringes AND THE CONVERSION CHART, you can get this capability. It is VERY important to use the conversion chart or you will wind up giving the wrong amount of insulin and possibly killing your kitty. I say this not to scare you but to impress upon you how important doing the conversion correctly is. However, the conversion chart is a wonderful tool and those syringes will allow you to have much more control over dosing. The chart can be found here: http://www.felinediabetes.com/insulin-conversions.htm If this is something you'd like to do and you have any questions about it, please ask.

If you can get into regular hometesting (before each insulin shot at least; ideally also testing around nadir to see how low he goes), we can help you interpret the numbers. Every cat is different, and there are no pat answers for what dose to give, but there are general guidelines and our own experiences, and we will be more than happy to share those with you if you'd like.

Welcome to FDMB and welcome to PZI land.

 

The good thing here is that you have narrowed the range for what constitutes a good dose for Buddha. Now your challenge is to refine the dose instead of bouncing back and forth between hypo and 500s. If you think about it mathematically, and 1/2 unit adjustment on a 2 unit dose is a pretty significant percentage change.

That's where the U-100 syringes come in handy with U-40 insulin. With the U-100 syringes that have 1/2 unit markings, each 1/2 unit mark = .2 units of insulin. So you can consistently give a dose of 2.2 units instead of having to jump up to 2.5 units. And you can pretty consistently modify the dose by .1 unit by eyeballing between the markings.

 

Thanks for the support!

I'm using U40 syringes. The vet sold me a ProZinc sharps container that came with syringes. They are slightly smaller the my normal ones--though the same brand. I might not be able to say with certainty that a particular dose is 2.2 or 2.3, but I am able to be consistent with dosing based on whether I put the top or the bottom of the rubbery part on which line (top of the 2, bottom of the 2, and there's a circle design on the other side.) Anyway, that doesn't worry me too much.

Since my numbers are all over the place, I wonder if: maybe I'm not mixing (rolling) the insulin bottle enough (unlikely), my Contour glucometer or strips are messing up (unlikely--but my control solution is out of date, so I haven't done that in a while), Buddha has a sputtering pancreas (and after all he's been through, I can't imagine any healthy pancreatic cells have survived), or the fancy feast varieties I give him aren't all low carb after all (unlikely, because so many fdmbers feed those.)

Oh, and the other oddity since ProZinc, is that Buddha is losing fur on his hind end--on his back near the base of his tail and on his stomach and inner thighs. It may be that he picked up fleas and so I treated him with Advantage at the end of December. My other cat is the flea barometer and he's well furred right now. I don't notice either of them twitching or acting uncomfortable.

 

Nancy & Donna, I just wanted to say welcome, and encourage you both to start new threads with questions about your kitties. I'm afraid your questions might end up getting lost here, and it could get confusing too with more than one cat & bean having questions.

Feel free to post as often as you want with updates & questions - many of us start a new thread each day when we have news. For a while we all did every day, but right now it's uneven (no news for Bix lately, so nothing to post! no news is good news )

Our group includes ProZinc support as others have said - although some of us are on other versions of PZI, there are a few others like yourselves who are trying out PZIR.