An article from a qualified veterinary surgeon. Lymphoma, Lymphosarcoma In The Dog, Diagnosis and Treatment. What you need to know.
Lymphoma, { Lymphosarcoma } is a fairly common malignant cancer which affects the lymphoid system of dogs. It mainly affects middle aged and older dogs and some breeds are said to have a predisposition to this disease, these include Rottweilers, Golden Retrievers and German Shepherds amongst others but any breed may be affected.
There are various forms of the disease but in dogs by far the the most common form is the multicentric form and this is the one I will cover today. Other rarer forms include the mediastinal form, the gastro-intestinal form and the cutaneous form.
Symptoms : The main signs you will see with the multicentric form of this disease are large swollen lymph nodes in the neck and elsewhere throughout the body, such dogs are often lethargic and you may see weight loss as well as other vague and non specific symptoms.
Diagnosis : The only sure way to diagnose lymphoma is via a lymph node biopsy, you can suspect it on clinical signs alone but you will not be 100% sure. Needle biopsies can be useful but I personally have had a few problems with this technique, I would prefer to carry out a wedge biopsy. Other tests such as blood tests are an aid to diagnosis but often do not present the whole picture.
Treatment : There are a number of common ways of treating lymphoma, one of which is by the use of a drug called Prednisone { Prednisolone } which can be given on it’s own. If you go down this road your dog is likely to have a six week to two month remission period, during this remission period these dogs will be close on normal and have a good quality of life. At the end of the remission period the disease will come back with a vengeance and normally your dog will unfortunately die very shortly after that. There are more advanced treatment plans involving standard chemotherapy drugs which will give significantly longer periods of remission. However using Prednisone alone previously will very much reduce the effectiveness of them if you decide to change treatments at some future point. So you have to decide which way to go from the start.
Standard chemotherapy protocols will give much better results than Prednisone on it’s own and the drugs used have included Vincristine, Cyclophosphamide, and Doxorubicin amongst others. In the treatments I have undertaken the side effects I have seen have normally been quite minimal. What you would normally achieve by this method would be nine months to a year of remission and normal life but then the drugs may become ineffective and the disease return although it may be possible to switch drugs at that point. Cures and longer emission periods are in theory possible but I personally have rarely seen any but common sense dictates that you would have a much better chance of success if your dog is dealt with by a specialist oncologist.
In some cases radio therapy may be of benefit but because of the logistics involved this is rarely carried out except at specialist centers.
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