Dr. Lera walks through histiocytomas in dogs using a patient named Ace. These round, pink bumps usually appear on the head or ears in dogs under three years old and often disappear on their own within three months. A study of 520 cases found fewer than 1% spread to lymph nodes, and even those resolved.
Hey, guys, Today My name is Dr. Lara. Today I am here with Ace. And Ace is here for a little growth that he has on the side, and we think it's something called a histiocytoma. So if you guys stay tuned, we'll get into what it is, how to diagnose it, and how to go about treating it. Stay tuned. All right, so histiocytoma. Histiocytomas are growths that are normally benign. They typically can be seen in any particular breed of dog and any age of dog. Most commonly, it's seen in dogs less than 3 years of age and even more concentrated in dogs that are a year or less. Ace actually happens to be about eight, about, I think, 15 months old. And so, you know, mom had described that he had this growth. And, you know, you can see that Ace has a very thick coat, so it's hard for us to see. So we did have to give him a little bit of a haircut. We'll see if I can, if I can get it on the video for you guys. And so when I took a look at the growth, normally these growths are going to be round. They're going to be kind of like a dome, and they will be pink. Most commonly, they will not have any hair on them. So. And they look, they can look kind of angry if you don't know what, what you're looking at. They can happen on any part of the body. Most commonly, it happens on the head and even more so on the flap of the ear. We call that the pinna. As you can see, Ace is a model patient. And so when we go about diagnosing it, the way that it's typically diagnosed is going to be on what we call histopathology. Histopathology is taking a chunk of the growth and sending it off to the lab or just removing the whole thing going ahead. Sorry. You want me to keep loving you. I see that there is something called a fine needle aspirate. A fine needle aspirate will not give you a definitive diagnosis on a histiocytoma. Very rarely do fine needle aspirate aspirates give you a definitive diagnosis. And when they do, a lot of times it still doesn't give you the finer details. So you usually end up having to do a biopsy of some sort or additional testing anyways. The. In regards to treatment of them, most of them will actually go away on their own with within one to three months, they usually are going to be less than 2 to 4 centimeters, most commonly less than 4 centimeters in size, and they can pop up pretty quickly. They can happen within about a week to three weeks. A lot of times when people bring us pets and they're like, oh, yeah, this just happened overnight. We're like, really? Really? But in this case, these are some of the growths that can happen relatively quickly. They do have a good prognosis. So they. Yay. Like I said, they will normally go away on their own within about two to three months. If the growths don't go away on their own at that point, we will go ahead and most likely biopsy it or remove it. For me, if the growth is somewhere where there's not a lot of extra tissue, like, let's say, the elbow or the knee or the toes, thank you for providing that. Like, in this particular area and we want to try and remove the whole thing, it's hard. So I tend to be more aggressive and making recommendations on biopsies or removing the masses, depending on the locations. Most commonly, you can actually. Even if you have growths in those particular areas. Okay, all right. In those particular areas, you can try freezing them. And that's something. Or cryosurgery. And that is something that can help to go ahead and get rid of it. I think they did a. There was one study that was done where there were 520 dogs that they had submitted the gross and they were diagnosed as histiocytomas. Three of those 520 came back, so that's less than 1%. And three of them actually metastasized, so spread to a local lymph node. But even then they still went away on their own. So at the end of the day, it is good news. Most common therapies are to either leave it, do cryosurgery on it to where we freeze it and then hope to break up those cells and cause it to go away on its own and also surgically removing it. If you guys have any questions about this particular video, please leave it in the comment box. If you found this video helpful, please give us a thumbs up. Helps us a lot with the YouTube algorithm. Also comment on it. We really appreciate that. And if you know somebody who you think might need to see this, please share it with them. We appreciate your guys watching and hopefully you found this helpful. Have a blessed day, Sam.
