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Saturday
8 A.M. - 1 P.M.

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For Emergencies Call: 978-649-3757

Seizures

Seizures occur when uncontrolled electrical activity temporarily scrambles the brain so it can’t make cohesive thoughts or properly control essential motor functions. The most common age for a dog to have its first seizure is 5-6 years of age. Purebred dogs (particularly Beagles, Labradors and Golden Retrievers) are more prone to seizures than are mixed breeds. With cats, all of this is much more variable.
A Petit mal seizure can be very subtle. Sometimes the only sign of that type of seizure will be 20-30 seconds of quietly sitting or standing still. Sometimes people interpret these types of seizures as “blackouts”. Sometimes seizure behavior will be expressed as head bobbing, or even as repeated trembling. Once again, because this type of behavior is subtle, often it is not identified as a seizure immediately.
The Grand Mal seizure is what most people think of when they think of seizures. It involves a few seconds to a few minutes of intense convulsions, a loss of consciousness, and often paddling of the feet and urination or defecation. Even though these seizures are very dramatic, they actually are harmless, as long as they are short (less than 10 minutes) and few and far between. This type of seizure can be preceded or followed by the “Ictal” phase, where the dog or cat acts unusually, and sometimes seems wobbly or disoriented. The “Ictal” phase can last for several minutes to several days.

Initial Diagnosis

There are a number of problems that can look like seizures but can be due to medical processes outside of the brain. Because of this, after your pet has its first seizure, we recommend a full check-up and a couple of simple blood tests. The blood tests are to check for evidence of diabetes, low blood sugar, low calcium, sodium imbalance, liver disease, kidney disease and infectious diseases. These tests usually come back normal, and if they do, we assume the seizure was a true seizure.
We do not usually put a dog on anti-seizure medication unless one of the following three things have started to occur:

1) The seizure itself lasts for more than 10 minutes at a time (Seizures longer than
10 minutes can cause the dog’s body temperature to rise to dangerous levels
and can be fatal). If a seizure lasts for more than 10 minutes, a vet must
give medication to stop the seizure.

2) The seizures occur more frequently than every 3-4 months.

3) Your dog or cat has many short seizures within a 2-3 day period of time. This is
called “clustering” and can also be very dangerous if it starts to happen.

The reason we do not give seizure medications immediately is because there are side effects to taking them, including increased appetite or thirst. Also prolonged administration of most seizure meds can adversely affect the liver. Also, our goal with seizure medications is not to stop them entirely, but to make them brief and few and far between. If the seizures are brief and infrequent already, the medication is not necessary.

The Plan
At this point in time we recommend you start keeping a diary, which notes the date and length of each seizure. This will help you keep track of when we need to start medications, or when we need to consider increasing the dose of the current medications. The min-calendars you get at the bank or at the Hallmark store work really well for this purpose.

Medications for your pet will depend primarily on the results of the blood tests and on the seizure history. It is common for us to not prescribe anything after the first visit for a seizure.