Are there any risk factors for this medication?
Meloxicam should not be used in patients with allergies to aspirin or other NSAIDs.
It should not be used in:
Meloxicam should be used with caution in:
Are there any drug interactions I should be aware of?
Caution must be taken when meloxicam is used in conjunction with many different drugs including certain antibiotics (e.g., gentamicin, amikacin), anaesthetics, anticoagulants (e.g., heparin, warfarin), diuretics (e.g., furosemide), antifungals (e.g., fluconazole), and immunosuppressive drugs (e.g., methotrexate, cyclosporine).
It is never a good idea to mix meloxicam with corticosteroids (such as prednisone, prednisolone) or other NSAID drugs.
Be sure to tell your veterinarian about any medications (including vitamins, supplements, or herbal therapies) that your pet is taking.
Meloxicam is a helpful medication for the treatment of arthritis pain. At recommended doses, most dogs have little to no side effects. At higher doses it can cause serious side effects, so it is important to only give the amount that your veterinarian prescribed.
This medication is also used in humans but with different dosages and side effects. If you accidentally ingest a pet medication, call your physician or the national Poison Control Center hotline at 800-222-1222.
Most dogs do well with the use of meloxicam. Some dogs will have side effects with vomiting and diarrhea being the most common. Some dogs, especially those with unknown kidney or liver disease can have serious side effects, which is why veterinarians will often recommend blood work before starting this medication long term.
Your veterinarian will prescribe a dosage of meloxicam that is based on your pet’s weight and type of inflammation. Some drugs with meloxicam have two concentrations of liquid, so please ensure that your medication matches the drug label.
NSAIDs block the production of natural chemicals that trigger inflammation, called a cyclooxygenase (COX) pathway. Some COX pathways are helpful with digestion, kidney health and clotting. In dogs, meloxicam blocks significantly more of the inflammatory chemicals than the beneficial ones. Because of this, meloxicam has fewer side effects in dogs than other NSAIDs, especially those developed for humans. However, at higher doses, meloxicam also partially blocks the beneficial chemicals, so it’s important to follow your veterinarian’s directions carefully.
Meloxicam (Metacam)
Originally published in the July 2015 issue of Veterinary Practice News. Loved this article and want to see more like it? Then
Many experts are unflagging proponents of long-term nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs to control arthritis pain, and for them the reasons are as plain as the limp in an arthritic dog’s leg.
Arthritis pain is a big barrier to wellness in the eyes of B. Duncan X. Lascelles, BSc, BVSc, Dipl. ECVS, Dipl. ACVS.
“The main thing is that controlling the pain allows a number of improvements to take place,” said Dr. Lascelles, Ph.D., CertVA, DSAS (ST), a professor of surgery and pain management at North Carolina State University College of Veterinary Medicine.
And Lascelles sees qNASIDs as one of the best ways to control pain, enabling muscle to be built back up, which gives an animal greater control of the joints, resulting in further decrease in pain.
Use of NSAIDs also allows central sensitization, which contributes to the pain state, to lessen or reverse. If a pet’s pain oscillates, he said, going from better to worse, that oscillation doesn’t allow for slow, progressive long-term improvements.
Julie Meadows, DVM, agreed. She is associate clinical professor for Community Practice (primary care) at the Small Animal Community Practice Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital at the University of California, Davis.
“The combined anti-inflammatory and analgesic effects of NSAIDs allow ongoing activity which perpetuates muscle mass and helps the joints share the load of the animals weight,” Meadows said. “As pain progresses, disuse atrophy accelerates the overall decline of the animals mobility.”
Jennifer F. Johnson, VMD, CVPP, owner of Stoney Creek Veterinary Hospital in Morton, Pa., is another proponent of long-term NSAID use.
“From a pain-management perspective, I believe that my patients that are on chronic, daily NSAID use fare much better than the patients whose owners try to chase pain by giving NSAIDs as needed, or on tough days,” Dr. Johnson said.
It’s difficult for clients to judge definitively how much pain their pet is in, which makes it impossible to accurately dose the pain with an NSAID “as needed,” Johnson said.
“When you think about the pain pathway and what happens in the spinal cord during chronic pain, it is easy to see that a chronic situation can turn into a situation where we have maladaptive pain,” Johnson said. “There are actually changes in the expressions of genes during maladaptive pain situations. We need to do everything we can to keep the pain at a minimum and this is where chronic NSAID use in arthritis should be our first line.”
After two or three weeks at the label-recommended dose, the dose can be adjusted downward to minimize the medication needed to keep the pain under control and prevent maladaptive pain conditions, or persistent pain that tends to be out of proportion to actual tissue damage, she added.
With osteoarthritis, a common cause of pain in pets, the cause of the inflammatory process cannot be reversed, so some biomechanical issue leads to what Johnson described as a vicious cycle: joint inflammation, leading to cartilage degeneration, leading to bone remodeling, leading to expression of inflammatory mediators in the joint, leading to the process repeating all over again.
“We can use the NSAID to help to break this cycle,” Johnson said. “We cannot change the conformation of a dysplastic hip, but we can control the inflammatory process.”
Robin Downing, DVM, Dipl. American Academy of Pain Management, Dipl. American College of Veterinary Sports Medicine and Rehabilitation, said NSAIDs are a cornerstone for managing the inflammatory pain of osteoarthritis.
“They are very effective for that component of the OA patient’s pain,” said Dr. Downing, hospital director at Windsor Veterinary Clinic P.C. in Windsor, Colo., and owner of The Downing Center for Animal Pain Management LLC. “Therefore, the benefit is that the NSAIDs help us to break the pain cycle and provide the animal with the opportunity to be more functional and therefore more active.”