Dr. Lera Clone walks through a brain tumor case in a 7.5-year-old English bulldog named Perla who had progressive seizures. MRI is the gold standard for diagnosis. Most dogs survive about 69 days after diagnosis, though surgery and radiation can extend that for some.
Hey, guys. Dr. Lara here today I am here with Perla. Perla is a 7 and a half year old female spayed English bulldog. And the topic of the video today is brain tumors. How to diagnose them, what the treatment is, and also what to kind of expect. All right, so like I said, this is Perla. She is here for brain tumors. But what had happened was she was actually having some seizures. I'm gonna put her on the ground just because you can see she's panting. We're gonna go ahead and collect some blood on her. Thank you for the paw. You're such a sweetheart. She's one of my girlfriends. She used to pee because she would get so excited when she would see me. So let's see here. I lost some of that touch as she's gotten older. Apparently things are getting a little stale. So I apologize ahead of time. Yeah, you're good for. So Perla initially presented to me because she was having what mom thought was a seizure. And so one of the things with brain tumors is, that's one of the most common things, is for them to have a brain tumor now causing the seizures. And so it is possible for a dog to have one seizure and never have another seizure again. But with Perla, that wasn't the case. She had one, then about a week later, she had another one. Then a few days after that, she had about two or three in a day. And so at that point, then we start to get concerned that, yes, these are actual seizures. These are seizures that are not going to go away, and we have to find the cause. And so the, the main way to go ahead and diagnose the cause of a seizure, those kinds of things, is usually to go to the neurologist, the veterinary neurologist. And a lot of the times, I won't say every single time, but a lot of times when the neurologists want to go ahead and help get a diagnosis, they usually want to do an mri. Now, there's a difference between the CT and the mri. The CT will catch a lot of things that, you know, X rays can't and that kind of stuff. But the MRI is the imaging modality or the, the way to image which is considered the best or the gold standard for neurology. So that's usually looking at the spinal cord, looking at the brain, those kinds of things. Now there are. And that's what ended up happening. She went to the neurologist, they did a CT scan, and they found a tumor in the front of her brain. She has most likely what is called a glioma. It's based on her age, so she's seven and a half. It's based on her breed being an English bulldog. And it's based on the location of where the tumor is and also what it looks like on the mri. That being said, the neurologist and myself and mom as well, don't think it's worthwhile to go ahead and do a biopsy on the tumor in her brain to go ahead and get the definitive diagnosis. Now, gliomas are the second most common kind of tumor. The most common kind of tumor is a meningioma. The meningiomas occur about 45 to 51% of the time. Based on different studies. The gliomas are about 21% of the brain tumors. And the third most common is what we call is our tumors are from metastatic disease. So that means you have a tumor somewhere else. The most common is a hemangiosarcoma. So hemangiosarcomas can come from either the heart or the spleen and then they will spread to the brain. And so that happens about 14.5% of the time. So the, those are the most common tumors. It is most commonly seen in dogs around nine and a half years of age. So typically the older dogs get, the more prone they are to if they, especially if they start having seizures. I think the age is after six or seven years of age. Once they hit that age, then if they start having seizures, the chances of them having a brain tumor is very, very high. That being said, like I said, the main way to diagnose it is typically going to be off of mri. The main treatment of choice is surgical resection. So yes, brain surgery. Now, not every tumor is accessible or operable. Unfortunately, in Perla's case, it is not an operable pain brain tumor. So another option for non operable brain tumors would be what's called radiation therapy. There are different kinds of radiation therapy and sometimes depending on the kind of tumor, it is the size of the tumor and that kind of stuff. Radiation therapy can be actually almost as good as traditional surgical excision. That means that the size of the tumor is not necessarily indicative of how significant the disease will be. So that's not something to get excited or upset about if you have a big, huge brain tumor or if you have, have a little tiny one. Chemotherapy is not something that is really doesn't seem to be done very often with brain tumors or primary brain tumors. She is currently on phenobarbital, which is an anti seizure medication and so that is something that is helping to manage her seizures. Since she's been started on that particular medication, she has not had any more seizures. There are a couple of other medications like Keppra, also called Levy, Tiracetam and Zonisomide are two other anti seizure medications that have been used or are used when patients are having seizures potentially tied to brain tumors that seem to control the seizures. Now in terms of survival time, the average survival time is 69 days. So a little over two months some I think there's one report of a dog living up to 270 days and then there are some cases where the dogs will only live 28 days. So it will depend on where you are at in terms of the progression of the disease, how long it's been since the symptoms first started and also in regards to the the kind of tumor it is, those will be the things that will end that will end up being the variables that will let us know how long it is before based on statistics, not hey, every case is different but based on statistics. This is the average survival time. That being said, Perla seems to be doing great right now. We are going to go ahead and try and get her off of the phenobarbital as you know, or as low a dose as possible. The client did ask me about CBD oil. Colorado State University vet school did try to do some studies about anti seizure effects from CBD oil. I'm not against it. When I spoke to the internal medicine specialist they did not say there were any contraindications. So you guys can definitely try that. I don't think that we will ever be able to get her off of anti seizure medication. So you know, if it's something that you're going to try, do it little by little. Otherwise if you guys found this video helpful, please give us a thumbs up. Subscribe and if you know anyone who needs to watch it, share it with them. Thanks for watching and be safe.
