How to Diagnose Epilepsy in Dogs

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Dr. Bob Pane with South Kendall Animal Clinic. Let's talk a little bit about diagnosing epilepsy in dogs. Epilepsy in dogs is actually a rule out, you really can't rule it in even with CAT Scans and MRI's we have today you really can't diagnose epilepsy without ruling everything else out because epilepsy can be a seizure caused by something other than something organic. Epilepsy is usually a spot in your brain that spontaneously depolarizes due to some cause. It could be from old trauma or something genetic. Usually if it is something genetic they get it from their mother and it shows up very infrequently initially then becomes more frequent with time. So what we do as veterinarians is rule out things like toxicity or diabetes or some other disease that could mimic the signs of epilepsy so we do urines and fecals and blood samples on the kidney and the liver functions and electrolytes to see if there is anything that may be looking like epilepsy but really not epilepsy. So usually it's a rule out. Usually we'll look at the animals. Usually it happens once or twice a month and then it happens maybe three or four times a month and then we start putting them on anti epileptic medication but there is no real definitive way. Sometimes CAT Scans, sometimes MRI's will find a focal area of the brain but normally they do not and most clients do not want to go that far to find out so we put them on anti epileptic medication when we see signs that look like that and we rule everything else out that could have been causing that that are more serious, toxicity is one of them, you know there are a lot of things that can cause seizure-like episodes in dogs that mimic epileptic type seizures. If the seizure avocy lasts for more than five or ten minutes then you need to go, call a veterinarian right away because it could be something more serious and not epilepsy. So epilepsy is a rule out, not a rule in and it is very difficult for veterinarians to really definitively diagnose that."