Dr. Lera Clone examines Barkley, a 14-year-old dog with progressive hind leg weakness, and works through degenerative myelopathy versus hip dysplasia. DM typically strikes dogs aged 8 to 14 years. Physical therapy, including underwater treadmill work, is the main treatment; genetic testing exists but doesn't confirm the diagnosis.
Questions this video answers
14‑year‑old male, intact, mixed‑breed dog.
Anywhere between 4 and 14 years; typically seen in dogs 8–14 years of age.
University of Missouri.
About 98–99% of the time.
Welsh Corgis, Boxers, and German Shepherds (German Shepherds noted in rare reports as young as 2 years).
Chapters
Hey, guys. Dr. Lara here today. I'm here with Barkley. Barkley is a 14 year old male, intact mixed breed dog. And he's coming in for a history of having difficulty rising and kind of slinking in his back legs. If you come over here, Abraham, you can see he's not really holding his legs up very well. And so sometimes this might be. This could be associated with potential intervertebral back disease or spinal cord issues. This also could potentially be considered associated with hip dysplasia. That's something else that would be a consideration. And so with this particular patient, after doing the exam, I don't really find that Barkley has any evidence of pain in his back really, or in his hips. And so then you start running into more neurologic diseases. And so one of the diseases that comes to mind would be something called degenerative myelopathy. Degenerative myelopathy is essentially the dog version of als. And we don't really know what the cause of this particular condition is. We do know that there are some mutations in some genes in the cells in the spinal cord and that kind of stuff. And there are some genetic tests that can be done. We had talked about doing genetic testing when we were talking about on one of my other videos about doing genetic testing on your dogs to see what kind of breed they are. I didn't really care so much what kind of breed your dog was, but rather the diseases that they were more prone to. And so degenerative myelopathy is one of those conditions that is something that can be tested for. University of Missouri does have a test that they can go ahead and do the check for patients that if they have the genes that actually have for degenerative myelopathy, but it won't necessarily give us a firm diagnosis. What I would do is, and Abraham, if you want, I'm just going to go ahead and put Barkley back. So if you just want to follow me, I'm going to pick Barkley up. Let's see here. All right, thank you very much. All right, we're just going to put Barkley back in his run just so that he's comfortable, he's got good flooring, and if he wants to move, he can move. And if not, no big deal. I'm gonna head back to the computer screen. Don't move so fast. All math. So it is something that, you know, like I was saying before, could be associated with either hip dysplasia. If he did have hip dysplasia, we would potentially look at Seen some issues with his hips which would be obvious on our X rays today. We were fortunate enough that the owner allowed us to do X rays on Barkley. And so that was something. When we come over here, we go to the viewer and we rotate this. He does have some hip dysplasia, but this is not, not the worst tips that I've ever seen by any means, especially for a 14 year old dog. So along speaking about ages, the typical ages for or the range of ages for dogs developing gender, male myelopathy or DM would be anywhere between 4 years old to 14 years old. It's typically seen in dogs between 8 to 14 years of age. They have seen some German shepherds as young as 2 years old that have been diagnosed. The breeds that are more common are the corgis. There's a lot of studies being done in Welsh corgis. Boxers are another one of the breeds. There are a few different breeds that are actually, we see this more associated with German Shepherds is another one. And so going along the lines of diagnosis, when I'm not able to elicit any sort of pain in his hips, nor elicit any sort of pain along his back, then we go ahead and start having to assume what the other potential diagnoses are. When we do the X rays on his abdomen, we can see over here, there's no evidence of any sort of arthritis or narrowing of the back, the intervertebral spaces. But the one thing is that I do notice an arch in this area right in here. And so I'm going to wait for the radiologist to go ahead and comment on this. Whenever we do X rays, we do, I want to say, 98 to 99% of the time we do send our X rays out to a board certified veterinary radiologist. It's unfair for you to expect your general practitioner veterinarian to know everything there is to know about veterinary medicine. So what I do is I surround myself with a team of experts who, once stuff starts to get outside my lane, I can go ahead and say, hey, the ball's in your court. What do you think? It's not so much about not being smart enough, but it's more about being smart enough to know when stuff is outside your comfort zone and then getting somebody else involved. And so I would much rather have somebody who looks at X rays all day long, spends an extra three years in training to go ahead and review the X rays versus somebody like me, who even on my busy days, I might look at a few X rays a day. These People sit there and look at X rays all day long. So I'll be curious to see if they have any sort of comment about what the backbones look like in this area. The other thing is when we go ahead and we do X rays and we send them out to the radiologist, it is something that we do go ahead and our eye will usually talk to the radiologist and talk to them about what I've seen on my physical exam findings versus what they're seeing, radiologically speaking. That being said, I'm not seeing anything obvious that would tell me, hey, he definitely has intervertebral disc disease or a slipped disc. And then that would lead me to believe that this is that condition. I think because I'm not palpating a whole lot of pain, I'm not seeing just completely destroyed or obliterated hips, that this is tied to hip dysplasia. So I'm now starting to look for things that could potentially be maybe non painful causes. And usually degenerative myelopathy is one of those particular conditions. Now, in regards to the potential treatments for this particular condition, there are not a lot of treatments that we have to date that really show a lot of success. The biggest modality of treatment that we have as of right now would be physical therapy. Physical therapy. We tend to see dogs last a lot longer when they undergo physical therapy. Underwater, treadmill, that kind of stuff to help keep their muscle masses up and engaged versus the dogs that don't receive any of that kind of activity or exercise, then their muscles just start to waste and then they can't really support themselves. Okay. At the end of the day, it is a hard disease because we don't really have a whole lot. I do wonder how much stem cells could potentially play a role in this particular area to maybe help regenerate some new cells. But that's something that would be more along the lines of experiments or stuff that we haven't seen to definitely show concrete data that supports that treatment shouldn't hurt the patients. I would think it can only help, but it is pretty expensive. So it would be something that somebody would have to be really committed to that particular patient. If you guys found this video helpful, please give us a thumbs up. Subscribe, subscribe. And if you know somebody who needs to watch it or wants some information, please share it with them. Thanks for watching and take care of yourself and be safe.
