Strategies for successful diet trials

Diet trials are a great resource for veterinary teams to utilize with a patient presenting with some type of allergic reaction. Despite the importance and benefits of diet trials, many pet owners and even some professionals could have misconceptions about how diet trials work, whether or not they are for every patient, and even the length of the trials.

To help provide some clarity on these questions surrounding diet trials, dvm360 recently interviewed Julia Miller, DVM, DACVD, at the Fetch Coastal Conference in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where she explained common misunderstandings with diet trials for patients, and provided tips to help these trials be as successful as possible.

Below is a partial transcript

Julia E. Miller, DVM, DACVD: The other big thing with diet trials I think people forget, is you're going to need anti-itch therapy. So don't just send them home with the diet and not relieve the itch in the pet. You need to decide what you're doing to also help manage that pets itch as you start the diet trial. And then, last but not least, I think a lot of us think that diet trials needed to be done [and] have to be fed for a full 3 months. We've now learned that you don't necessarily have feed it for the full 3 months. You can actually get away with 6 to 8 weeks to feed a diet trial and then see how it's actually going, so routine checkups are really important.