Monitoring long-term anti-inflammatory therapy for canine allergic dermatitis

During an interview with dvm360 at the 2025 WVC Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, Brittany Lancellotti, DVM, DACVD, from Veterinary Skin and Ear in Los Angeles, California, and host of the podcast Your Vet Wants You To Know, shared the best strategies veterinary professionals can use for monitoring canine allergic dermatitis patients on long-term anti-inflammatory therapy.

Below is a transcript of the episode

Brittany Lancellotti, DVM, DACVD: My name is Dr Brittany Lancellotti, I am a veterinary dermatologist at Veterinary Skin and Ear in west Los Angeles.

So with patients that have allergic skin disease, this is a lifelong disease, and it's important that we monitor the safety and [ethicality] of the therapies that we're giving to these animals. One way we can do that is by focusing on figuring out their primary triggers, making sure that they're on good flea prevention so that we're ruling out the possibility of flares from flea allergies, doing a really good elimination diet trial, which at this time is the only diagnostic test for being able to diagnose or exclude a food allergy, and if they have environmental allergies, working with allergy specific immunotherapy formulated by a veterinary dermatologist to help minimize the frequency and severity of flares and secondary infections to environmental triggers.

But if we have to use some type of symptomatic anti-inflammatory therapy on a long term basis, things that we can do to help make sure that we're minimizing the risks associated with those therapies are monitoring blood work, so CBC and chemistry, to make sure that our white blood cell counts are not dropping, we're not causing liver disease, kidney disease or increase in blood sugar; making sure that we're doing adjunctive therapies like topical barrier repair and anti microbial bathing so that we can minimize the inflammation coming from microbial overgrowth and help to minimize flares from surface allergens from crossing that impaired barrier. So if we can incorporate these adjunctive therapies, we can minimize the amount of anti-inflammatory medications that we need to use, but then also monitoring on a regular basis to make sure that we're not developing those long term adverse effects.