Dusty's Strange Behavior

[keke06]

My old Russian Dwarf hamster, Dusty, started acting very strange about 2 weeks before he passed. I'm bringing this up because I don't know exactly what happened to him and I would like to stop it from happening to one of my current hams.
I bought Dusty from Petsmart on July 3rd 2014 and he died August 18th 2014. He was difficult at first, but I successfully tamed him after about 2 weeks of owning him. He was very sweet for a while. Never bit me (after tamed) and never bit the cage bars. This all changed when he became ill. I didn't even know he was sick until hours before he died because I never really thought of it (this was my first hamster). He started running around like a crazy ham and biting the cage bars/ trying to escape. I would take him out often to get exercise, but right when I put him back in the cage he would bite the bars. He also started to bite and nibble me very often. Before this started, my friend who is also a hamster owner came over to my house when he was not sick. Couple weeks later, I went over that same friend's house when he was sick (I brought Dusty along) and she noticed that he lost a lot of weight since she last saw him. I hadn't noticed this before but when she pointed it out I could really see it. We compared the pictures from when I first got him on my phone to how he was at that point and noticed something was really wrong. His fur looked very unkept and he lost a lot of weight. I was giving him his regular amount of food and he seemed to be eating it all, but he looked so sick. His teeth were fine (the bar biting didn't cause this). That night he died and there was nothing I could do about it.
Now I am very alert with my two current hams and constantly looking out for possible diseases.

I'm wondering what exactly it was that he had?
And please post if something like this happened to your ham!

[cypher]

Sorry to hear this happened, it sounds distressing. I really don't know what would have caused your hamsters problems but it does sound as though he was showing signs of distress & may have been in pain for some reason.
It's hard to have to learn from things that go wrong with our hamsters but in future I would just try to be very aware of any unexplained change in behaviour & if you have the slightest doubt about their health get the vet to give them a once over, I think it's always best to be safe rather than sorry even though going to the vet can be a bit stressful for them.
I weight my hams once a week, it is hard to really see if the little dwarfs are gaining or losing weight as they're such fluffballs so I prefer to keep a record which helps monitoring their health.
Hope that helps a bit.