Dr. Lera Clone treats Mindy, a 9-year-old dog who tore both ACLs within six weeks. Surgery fixed the worse leg; the team is using platelet-rich plasma and stem cell therapy on the other. Dogs with one ACL tear have a 40-60% chance of tearing the opposite leg within 12-18 months.
Questions this video answers
About nine years old.
About six weeks before the video (initial tear in the back left leg).
40–60% chance within 12–18 months.
The right leg (the most affected at presentation).
Stem cell therapy and platelet-rich plasma (PRP) therapy for the left leg.
Chapters
Hey guys, My name is Dr. Lara here at Heron Links Animal Hospital. Today I'm here with Mindy. And Mindy is an older mixed breed dog. She's about nine years old. And Mindy had a history where she had actually torn her ACL on her back left leg about six weeks ago. And if you guys have watched one of our other videos about ACLs or craniocruciate ligaments, you'll know that there's a 40 to 60% chance that the patient tears the other leg in the next 12 to 18 months. Unfortunately, we were, we were waiting to see how Mindy was recovering because we anticipated that she had a partial tear on her left leg. And what ended up happening was she completely blew out or tore the ligament on the opposite leg in six weeks. And so she was unable to walk. She was dragging herself around the house. And so we went ahead, we had her evaluated and confirmed that she did have that torn acl. So in this situation, when your dog, if your dog has two torn ACLs, usually it is not recommended to do both ACLs at the same time because of the high complication rates. And so as of right now, what we did was we did the leg that was most affected at the time, which is her right leg in this particular patient. And so what mom and dad want to do is they want to go ahead and look at doing stem cell therapy and PRP therapy, which is platelet rich plasma in the left leg, which we suspect has a partial tear. And so the reason that we're looking at doing that is because they want to try and do things that are non surgical on that particular leg. The right leg, we surgically corrected it and as of right now, we've opted not to do any of that stem cell therapy or PRP therapy. But on the left leg we are probably going to do that to see if we can get that ligament to repair itself. There's a 69% chance that that will actually happen with the PRP and the stem cell therapy based on another study. The other thing that we're going to do, starting in the next few days, we are going to start physical therapy. We're going to, we'll do that and I have a follow up video so that you can see how Mindy is doing. If you guys have any questions about this particular topic, let us know. Otherwise, if you found this video helpful, please give us a thumbs up. Subscribe and share. Thanks for watching and have a great day.
