Hey, guys. Doctor, Chris, I wanna spend some time to talk about this condition because I didn’t realize how many people had headset have had this. I’ll try to keep the video within 3 minutes if possible. But basically one of the comments was, how can you tell your DOC has this condition is something called osteosarcoma. It’s a malignant type of bone cancer and it generally affects larger breed dogs. So think German shepherds, rot Wallace, Golden retrievers, greyhounds, wolfhounds as well, boxes. Often the DOC presents with the non weight bearing lameness. So what that means is with lameness you’ve got dogs that put weight on the leg, but then they limp occasionally with this condition because it’s so painful, the patient lifts the leg completely off the ground. And it can happen at any age. Unfortunately, I’ve seen doubts of osteosarcoma as young as 2 years of age. This patient initially presented with a lameness of the leg, and we thought it was an ACL injury, but it turned out that it wasn’t. The only way to tell definitively is to take X rays and then base of the X rays potentially perform something like a biopsy. So like a needle espirit or a true cut biopsy and then sending that sample away to get confirmation via histo pathology. This owner unfortunately waited about 5 months before coming back for the X rays. And I didn’t see this down initially. But when I saw this DOC, when it came in for X rays 5 months after the dot was completely non weight bearing on this leg. And when I had a few of the knee, it was completely swollen. It was almost twice the size of that Anthony. So I almost knew like immediately that this was something really bad.
Other conditions that you would think about would be other types of bone cancers or a fungal or bacteria osteomyelitis, which is like a fungal or bacterial infection. With those conditions, though, the patients are often quite unwell. They might run a fee for, they might be lethargic, which is not what we were seeing with this patient. You can see from the X ray here that the margins of the FEMA are nice and smooth, but then when you go down to the knee here, the margins are no longer nice and smooth, very irregular. You’ve got like a Sunburst kind of pattern. It sort of is going outwards and the transition zone is very poorly defined. So, you know, this is something bad. This is something like cancer, really bad infection. This cancer will spread to the chest first. So you always take chest X rays. And the median survival time on the average survival time is about 12 months.
The two main goals of treatment for this condition is pain relief, so or medications or taking away the source of the pain, which is amputation. The other goal is to stop the spread of the disease. So you need to check your regional lymph nodes. You need to check your X rays as well. Potentially start something like chemotherapy. Some dogs live for less than 12 months. Some do. Dogs live for more than 12 months with amputation and chemo, but it is very sad condition.