Amphetamine Toxicity in Pets: What You Need to Know
Have you ever thought about what prescription drugs in your home could be dangerous for your furry friends? In this episode, we delve into a topic that is not often talked about but is important for pet owners to know. Amphetamine toxicity in pets can be caused by both legal and illegal drugs, and the effects on our pets can be devastating. Listen in to learn the different types of prescription drugs that are amphetamines and toxic to pets, what symptoms to look for, and what actions to take if you suspect your pet has ingested one of these drugs.
We also explore the physiological effects of stimulants on pets, which parts of their body are most affected, and the importance of seeking veterinary care as soon as possible. If you want to know the treatments available for amphetamine toxicity and discover more about this important topic, don’t miss today’s tips on how to keep your beloved pets safe.
What You’ll Learn:
Which common prescription drugs are amphetamines and therefore toxic to dogs.
What stimulants do to your pets if they ingest them.
Which parts of the body these drugs affect in your pets.
When you should bring your pet in once you start seeing signs.
How to treat amphetamine toxicity.
The importance of giving your pets a lot of fluids during this time.
Ideas Worth Sharing:
“If your pets have dilated pupils and you do take stimulants for medication, definitely bring your pet in to the veterinarian.” - Tyler Sugerman
“Always keep your medications out of reach from your pets.” - Tyler Sugerman
“If you know your pet got into your prescribed medications, bring them in to the vet right away.” - Tyler Sugerman
Resources Mentioned:
ASPCA 888-426-4435 or pet poison helpline 855-764-7661
Read The Transcript:
Welcome to Vetsplanation. I'm your veterinary host, Tyler, or you can call me Suggs. This podcast is about educating pet parents about what is going on with their furry little loved ones. As an emergency veterinarian, I understand how hard it is to explain complex diseases in terms that are understandable for pet parents in a few short minutes before the next critical case comes in.
In this podcast, we can dive deeper into understanding of what our pets are going through and break down those complex medical terms into easier to understand chunks of information.
Just a quick disclaimer: this podcast is for informational purposes only. This is not meant to be a diagnosis of your pet. If you have questions about diagnostics or treatment options, please talk to your veterinarian about those things.
Remember, we are all practicing veterinary medicine, and medicine is not an exact science. Your veterinarian may have different treatment options. The information I provide here is to help pet parents, and it's not related to my place of work. I'm here for you guys to provide free information and knowledge.
If you like our podcast, consider sharing this podcast with at least one friend or someone else who has pets and could benefit from this.
Now, let's jump into this week's episode.
Tyler Sugerman: Hey everybody, welcome back to the podcast, I hope you had a great week. Today, we're going to be talking about Amphetamines, so amphetamine toxicity. Now most people when they think about amphetamines, they usually think of just illegal drugs, but this actually comes in legal forms as well.
So, we're going to talk about what those are, what the different types of medications that could cause an amphetamine toxicity are, what they do to our pets, some of the clinical signs that you'll notice, and then also what to do, or when should you bring them into the vet.
So, let's start out with just what are some of the legal amphetamines? So, amphetamines that are legal are usually going to be ones that are used for like ADD or ADHD medications. These are things like Adderall, Dexedrine, Desoxyn, and Vyvanse.
I might be leaving some out, there's definitely a lot of medications out there, but those are the most popular ones. Usually, Adderall can be the most popular of those.
And then just as a side note, there are other drugs that are used for ADD and ADHD medications. They also cause stimulation just like the amphetamines do. But the two that I'm thinking of very specifically, are Concerta and Ritalin, they're not amphetamines but they're similar to them. They still cause that stimulation but are not an amphetamine.
And interestingly, those can or may not potentially show up on a drug test. Under an amphetamine, they've had cases of false positives with it in cases of having negatives. So, it's not a hundred percent sure whether they actually will show up positive for amphetamines, but they're just not an amphetamine.
So, they also are used for other things as well. So, they're given as prescriptions for weight loss and also, used for narcolepsy in people as well. Most of these drugs are going to be ones that are prescribed for humans. There are not a lot of cases where they're prescribed for animals, so usually, this is a toxicity because somebody accidentally dropped their pill and then the animal picked it up.
Now, I said there are legal ones like we've just talked about for ADHD, weight loss, narcolepsy, but there's also the illegal street drugs as well. So, this is typically going to be what we usually term meth or crystal meth, and then ecstasy as well.
Now, when we're comparing those two (usually are legal ones) we know exactly how many milligrams or how much is in each one of those pills. If somebody brings their pet in and they're showing all the symptoms that we think look like an amphetamine toxicity and they say, “Yeah, I take Adderall this many milligrams,” and they can tell us if it's extended release or if it's just a regular release one, and we have a good idea of how detrimental this could potentially be.
Versus our illegal street drugs (our methamphetamines, ecstasy) those have huge problem because we don't know how much of that drug is in whatever they ingested, and is it mixed with anything else, because they can definitely be mixed with other drugs as well, which can make our symptoms look different and it also makes it hard for us to know if this could be a detrimental amount or not.
So, what do these drugs do? So, pretty much all these drugs will do the same thing. So, like I said, they are stimulants. So, it's like somebody taking a large amount of coffee or something. With the stimulants they're called sympathomimetic. It just means that it acts on the sympathetic nervous system.
So, if you are thinking about the sympathetic nervous system, it takes over when you have fight or flight or when you're running away from a lion, your body is just focused on it needs to go, go, go. So, that's what happens with the sympathetic nervous system. It is focused on you're running, it's focused on your brain thinking, it's focused on making everything in your body work more efficiently.
It is not focused on things like your digestive system. If you're running away from a lion, your body doesn't care if you are digesting that hamburger or not, which is why it's used for weight loss because then your body is not going to be thinking about it's hungry, it's going to just metabolize those things very quickly and then make you not hungry anymore.
If you're running away from a lion, then you don't want to fall asleep. So, another thing that this does is it helps people who have narcolepsy because it makes them stay awake for longer so that they're not just falling asleep all the time.
So, now, we can start thinking about what is this going to do in our pets? It's going to affect mainly four different parts of our body. So, the first one for our dogs and cats is going to be the CNS or the central nervous system.
A lot of times, this is going to cause agitation, it's going to make their pupils be really big, they'll have tremors or even seizures. I had one person who had come in and she didn't know what was wrong with her dog. It really just looked like he had googly eyes is what she had described it as. And when I went in and looked at the dog, I understood then what she was saying, like their eyes, their pupils are really, really large.
One of the other things that I put under CNS signs, that's not in the literature but I see very often is they become very aggressive as well. This one who came under the googly eyes, he was very aggressive, he was attempting to attack his own owner in the room, and she said he never did that. He was a very nice dog. And once he was better, he was a great dog. But during that time when he was on methamphetamines, he was not very nice at all.
The second body part that it usually affects is the cardiovascular system. So, cardio, meaning your heart, vascular meaning your veins. So, it's going to cause them to have a really fast heart rate. Again, if we're running away from a lion, we need our heart to be going very fast so that way we'll have more oxygen to the rest of the body to go faster.
The other thing it's going to cause is hypertension or basically a high blood pressure. Those two things are okay for short periods of time when we're sprinting away from our lion, but we can't do that for 12, 14, 24 hours. Like those things need to come down, we need to get them leveled off, which is why this is important.
The next system is the gastrointestinal system. So, this is when our poor dogs and cats are having vomiting and diarrhea, and they're just salivating like crazy, they're just drooling nonstop. And for them, it makes them a lot more nauseous than it does for us. Especially, because they're getting much higher doses than what they would need for their actual body size.
And then the last thing that's affected is usually the respiratory system. So, that means that they're usually panting really hard, they're just panting constantly.
So, if you start noticing some of these signs at home and you're like, “Oh my dog’s eyes do look like they have googly eyes,” or they are just drooling excessively and panting really hard and they can't sit still, then if you do have any sort of amphetamines in the house, then definitely need to bring them into the clinic.
But those are some of the things you want to be watching for because some people aren't even sure if they dropped a pill or if the kid dropped a pill, and those are some of the things you can watch for to determine whether they do need to go under the vet or not.
And speaking of whether you need to go under the vet or not and watching for these clinical signs, this actually absorbs really, really rapidly from the GI system. So, pretty much as soon as it hits the stomach, it’s absorbed pretty quickly. It can start absorbing within 15 minutes of being ingested.
The peak concentration for them is usually one to two hours for the regular types of amphetamines. For any of those ones that are the extended-release ones, those can have a longer time of absorption and a longer half-life. But I don't know all the statistics on those because they're going to range just depending on which medication it is. But it will take a longer amount of time.
And then this clinical science can last for anywhere between 24 to 72 hours. So, it depends on again, whether they have the sustained ones or if they just have the regular release pills. For the regular release pills, most of those only last for about 24 hours but most of the extended-release ones will last about up to 72 hours in our pets.
So, when should you bring them in? So, ideally, if you saw your dog or cat ingest it, ideally bring them in right away. We want to try to make them vomit as soon as possible. If it's a dog, that's going to be a much easier task to make them vomit than it is for a cat.
Cats … no vomit when you don't want them to vomit, and they won't vomit when you do want them to vomit. So, they're always very difficult to make them vomit, but we always try because if we can get it up the least amount that they have ingested or the least amount that is already absorbed is going to be much better for them.
Because they're usually a lot smaller than a lot of our dogs. Maybe not all of our dogs, maybe like not our little chihuahuas and stuff but a lot of our dogs. So, ideally, we still want to bring them in, we still want to try to make them vomit, if we know that they did ingest it.
If we don't know that they ingested it, then it might just be watching for some of those clinical signs at first. You can definitely bring them in, we can definitely make them vomit, and then monitor them for overnight.
We don't a hundred percent know, we just kind of are playing it safe and try to make sure we don't see some of those clinical signs, which is going to be the ideal thing to do. We would prefer to make a poor dog vomit that didn't actually ingest it, and then monitor it for overnight, versus having them start having clinical signs and then it becomes a problem.
But like I said, if you don't know you just start seeing that your pet is having these clinical signs, your cat is just running around like crazy with its eyes really dilated, or your dog is becoming extremely aggressive and drooling for no reason, then bring them in immediately, and then also try to find out like were there amphetamines in the house or some sort of stimulant in the house because even Ritalin and Concerta can do this as well.
They just won't show up positive on our tests like I was saying before, which makes this a little bit harder for us because if it doesn't show up positive, we're just guessing that's what it is, and then doing medications and fluids and stuff for that.
But if you do know that's even better for us. And then also, I've had this situation before that they weren't sure what the pill was. They just saw that their dog had eaten a pill and they could kind of describe the pill.
You can go onto like Google, there's pill finders on Google, or even calling poison control and asking them what pills they could potentially be. But even just like searching for some of those pills online, like if you can remember like it's yellow, it was diamond shaped, it had rounded edges to it, then you might be able to find it on those pill finders to figure out what kind of medication it could be.
And that's essentially what we did for one of the clients that I had seen. She could describe it, we looked it up on our pill finder, figured it out as to which ones it could potentially be, we narrowed it down to just a couple. Some of them are really hard when they're just like a white square pill or a white round pill. There are thousands of medications that could be that, so not always helpful but sometimes it can be.
Now, how do we treat this? There’s technically no antidote to this, it's only symptomatic care. So, the first thing like I said, bring them in and we make them vomit. We want to try to get out as much as possible so that there's not as much medication that they could potentially absorb.
The second thing is we usually give activated charcoal. So, what it does is … it does a couple things; it binds to the medication is what we're hoping, and it helps it to pass through so that there's not as much absorbed in their body.
But it also can act as a bulk feed in a sense, like it's pushing things through faster so that also the body just can't absorb it. Now, activated charcoal, I do usually warn people that your dog or cat is going to have black stools for the next three days after we give the activated charcoal, so don't be too alarmed when you see that. That's just because we needed to make sure we tried to get as much out as possible.
The next big thing is sedation. So, we talked about how their heart rate is going crazy, their blood pressure is super high, those can become dangerous things and can start to cause arrhythmias. So, an irregular rhythm of the heart and we want to try to make sure that doesn't happen, so we want to sedate them.
Usually, we're giving acepromazine for them to try to help bring down both their blood pressure and also, their heart rate at the same time. But we have to be very careful about that because some dogs or some cats only have their heart rate elevated and their blood pressure is actually normal or low, and we don't want to give those acepromazine, instead we give them other medications.
Usually, propranolol is what it's called as the other medication that we give. But that just depends case by case as to what each pet's heart rate and blood pressure are. We also need to help them thermoregulate or meaning we need to make sure their temperature is normal.
Some dogs and cats will get very hot on this, or some dogs and cats will get really cold as well depending — because if they're really hot and we're giving them acepromazine, so medication for sedation to bring their heart rate and blood pressure down, that can sometimes make them become too cold. And when that happens now, we have to warm them back up. So, really, it's like constantly monitoring their temperature to make sure that they stay within an adequate range.
The next big thing is IV fluids. We need to give them fluids into their vein in order to be able to flush as much out as possible. We're also keeping them hydrated at the same time. They're not really eating during this time, they're not drinking during this time, because like I said, you're running away from a lion, you do not care if you are hungry, you're not going to stop to eat, you're not going to stop to drink.
So, with them, they're not going to do that either. They're not going to drink, they're not going to eat. The eating is not as huge of a deal for this time period, but the drinking can be, we don't want them to become dehydrated.
So, we want to give them IV fluids to flush as much of that drug out as possible, and also to help keep them hydrated. We're also monitoring their blood pressure and their EKG or basically looking to see what the rhythm of the heart is to make sure there's no arrhythmias.
If there is an arrhythmia or an irregular rhythm of the heart, then we're going to give medications to try to intervene with that as well. Now, that really depends on which type of arrhythmia there is, so I'm not going to go into which medications those are, but we're still monitoring those things pretty consistently to make sure that their heart rate and their heart rhythm are okay.
Sometimes they do need muscle relaxers, so those dogs and cats that are tremoring really badly or those dogs and cats that are having seizures, you will give medications for that. It depends on which one they're having, whether they're having muscle tremors versus they're having seizures as to which medication we'll end up giving.
And one interesting thing about these amphetamines is that they do act a lot like an SSRI medication. So, those are a lot of those medications that people use for depression. These actually act a lot like that, aren't a lot of the same receptors.
So, we give a drug called cyproheptadine, which is being more commonly used for like allergies, but for some of these toxicities we can actually use them to help reverse the toxicity. So, this is one of those, we can use this serotonin agonist to be able to reverse a little bit of these symptoms.
It's not going to make it completely go away just by giving one dose, a lot of times we have to give multiple doses to try to help decrease a lot of these symptoms, but still pretty cool that we can use a different drug that's not exactly the same to be able to reverse it.
And then there's also been a really cool study that was published in 2022 that looked at lipid therapy. So, lipid therapy is literally putting fat into the veins. Oddly enough, with Adderall and these other medications, these other stimulants, they really like fat. So, they like to sit in a lot of fat and they prefer to be in fat water soluble. They're fat soluble, which is also called lipophilic (loves fat basically).
And what they did is that they had this dog that had ingested a very large amount of Adderall, a possibly lethal dose could kill the dog. It was such a high dose, and they gave this dog lipid therapy.
So, like I said, it's literally putting this fat that has been broken down so that that way it makes it very sterile still, but it looks white like fat would be. And you put it into the veins, and it's supposed to absorb some of these toxins that are lipophilic.
Well, this dog was discharged within less than 24 hours. It did so well and was able to go home just by giving lipid therapy. We do use lipid therapy for a lot of other things as well, like pot toxicities is a really common one that we'll use it for if they're really bad.
If it's just one that's like just got into the plant, it's usually not a big deal. But for some of these dogs that had gotten into the edibles, that's really lipophilic. The THC is usually in the butter and that makes it really fatty, and it'll stay in the system for a lot longer.
And if you want to know more about that, listen to my THC talk from episode three I believe. But how cool is that, that you could have this super lethal dose, something that could have killed this dog, we would expect that it's going to be in the hospital for at least 72 hours or longer, having to deal with a lot of these really terrible symptoms.
We'd just give it fat and then it can absorb all of that, and the dog could go home potentially in less than 24 hours. I mean it has some really cool things. Not every drug is going to be lipophilic, unfortunately there are some things that are just — the lipid therapy is not going to work for, but this is one of them, which I think is pretty cool.
So, ideally, this happens, the dog does well or the cat does really well, hopefully, they go home sometime between that 24 to 72 hours when they're feeling better. We don't have to wait until they're a hundred percent, but we want to make sure that they're not as twitchy, not as tremory, their heart rate is under control.
Maybe we send home medication and maybe some medication to help for muscle relaxation or medication to help with the serotonin. But it just depends on how they're doing by the time we send them home. But ideally, they get sent home and everything goes well and usually, after that, they're fine. They usually don't have any long-term effects from this.
Now, some of the most common questions I get are, first of all, “When should I bring them in?” So, like I've talked about already, ideally if you know that they got into it, bring them in right away. We want to try to make them vomit, try to get it out of their system as much as possible.
The second most common question I get is, “Is there anything else that this could be?” And yes, they're absolutely is. Some people think that there's no way that their dog or cat could have gotten into any Adderall. If, let's say, maybe it was Ritalin, if we did a drug test, it may come up negative.
But if we do a drug test and it comes up positive for amphetamines, we have to assume it's either, one of the amphetamines that is a legal drug or one of the amphetamines that is an illegal drug.
And some people will get upset to say, “Well, there's just no way. I don't have it in my house, my kids aren't on it.” But we don't think about sometimes the other people who are coming in and out of our house. Is it another kid that came over? Or was the dog out in the front yard and a kid went by? Or was it some worker that came to the house that accidentally dropped a pill?
People will put pills in their pocket all the time and walk out and not think about it. As soon as you go to pull something out of your pocket, it falls out. And unless you knew that it fell out, there's no way that they were going to be able to tell you, “Hey, I dropped my pill somewhere in your house and I think your dog ate it.”
So, it's not always completely impossible, but again, if it comes up positive on our drug test, and it shows all those same symptoms, then we have to treat it as such.
And then the next common question I get is, “How will I know if it is amphetamines versus a methamphetamine?” Meaning how do I know, is it a legal drug versus an illegal drug? Maybe we have a sketchy uncle or something that lives in the house and people are worried that maybe he brought methamphetamines in the house.
So, there are drug tests that show amphetamines versus methamphetamines. It's just a urine test that we do. So, we usually get urine from the pet, we do it on a dip stick just like you would at a drug testing facility. You usually pee in a cup, they dip the stick into your urine, and it comes up and tells you if there's any drugs that you could potentially be on.
So, this does the same thing. Some of them will only just say amphetamines, there's no way to know the difference between those when you're using those drug tests. But some will say amphetamines and have a different one that says methamphetamines. It's just slightly different chemical. And that's how we know is this an amphetamine or is this a methamphetamine.
And even then, that still doesn't a hundred percent tell you whether it's legal or an illegal one, because there are methamphetamines that are legal ones. But most of them are not specifically methamphetamines, most of them are amphetamines.
And then the other question I get is, well if it's an illegal one, is it crystal meth or is it ecstasy? There's no way for me to tell, there's no way for me to know. There's no drug test or anything that we can do for animals that's just going to tell you that.
So, it's just to tell you whether there's amphetamines in the system or potentially the difference between amphetamines and methamphetamines. So, unfortunately, I can't tell you if your sketchy uncle brought drugs into the house or not.
So, I think that's it for today. I'm going to tell you my cool animal fact real quick. Do you know how they age, whales? So, they actually use their ear wax to age them, isn't that crazy?
So, what they found is that their earwax is partially made of keratin, so kind of like the same thing that our hair and our fingernails are used for.
For dogs and cats, a lot of times use their teeth and even then, sometimes it's just our best guess as to how old they are using their teeth, but it really depends on how well they were taken care of. Were their teeth really well taken care of? Did they get dentals very often? Did they not get dentals very often? To help us decide how old that pet might be.
And even then, I usually tell people (this is just my best guess) it could be this range to this range, who knows? But scientists found with whale earwax, there's a dark ring and then there is a light ring basically. And each pair correlates to a year of life basically.
So, if the whale was 10-years-old, you'd have 10 pairs of light and dark rings. How crazy is that? They also found lots of other cool things that you could find even just within the whale’s earwax.
Like they looked for chemicals and stuff to try to know when they could have been in certain places, if mercury was really high when the whale was six-months-old, where could they have been at six-months-old? And maybe later on, they found out when the whale had matured. Its super cool.
Can you imagine if somebody just pulled out some of your earwax and was like, “Let me tell you all of the data about yourself just based on this earwax plug.” Amazing, super cool what science can do.
Next week, I'm going to talk about just some of the things that we can see on blood work. Like why do we do blood work? What are we looking for, and what does it not look for? And again, thank you so much everybody.
If you have any questions, please feel free to email me. Ffind me on Facebook, find me on Instagram, wherever you like. I'm happy to answer any questions about any of my past episodes, this episode, or if you have any suggestions for a future episode, thanks guys.
Thanks for listening this week. If you have any questions, comments, suggestions, or you just want to say hi, feel free to email me at suggs@vetsplanationpodcast.com.
You can visit our website at vetsplanationpodcast.com, or you can find us on Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok at Vetsplanation.
Thank you all again for listening and we'll see you back here next week.