Complete Care for Your Aging Cat - Amy Shojai [78]
Treatment
Owners of pets diagnosed with brain tumors may opt either for palliative care—keeping the cat comfortable perhaps with anti-seizure medication until the end—or treating to get rid of a tumor. Surgery, radiation therapy, and chemotherapy from the cancer arsenal may be helpful, alone or in combination. Surgery is usually the treatment of choice.
“I don’t see people who aren’t committed,” says Dr. Klopp. “They say, I just want it out. I want to know it’s not growing in my cat’s brain.” The nice thing about cat brain tumors is they can be treated and after surgery they don’t tend to come back. “Frequently they can be considered curable,” says Dr. Klopp. “Cats can live for years after having a meningioma.” Because most patients are already senior citizens, adding two or more years of quality of life is a significant benefit.
The drawback with surgery is that it can be expensive. “You’re talking about a pretty big emotional and financial commitment for the owner,” says Dr. Klopp. While radiation or chemotherapy is an option, she says she’s not had much luck with chemotherapy for brain tumors in pets. “It’s not my first choice,” she says, but she will offer it as adjunct therapy or if clients can’t afford or don’t want surgery. “It depends on the client and patient individually. I’m not going to offer brain surgery to every single case that has a brain tumor. The goal is to give them back a happy quality of life, and if I don’t think I can do safely, I’m not going to offer that.”
It can be difficult to avoid damaging normal tissue with radiation therapy. Yet an innovative method is now available at University of Florida’s Evelyn F. and William L. McKnight Brain Institute. The system uses a three-dimensional ultrasound guidance system to pinpoint the location of the tumor, and target radiation beams precisely, while sparing the surrounding tissue.
With the new technique, pets can be treated in one high-dose treatment, rather than through repeated sessions over a period of weeks. Radiation therapy requires anesthetic to keep the pet in the proper position, so the single treatment session avoids the repeated doses of anesthesia that is a concern in geriatric cats. The procedure costs roughly the same as for traditional veterinary radiation therapy, but a limited number of animals may be eligible for subsidies or free follow-care and imaging.
“So far we’ve done a total of 22 animals, including both cats and dogs,” says Nola Lester, BVMS, a clinical instructor in radiology with the University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine. “In some cases we’ve seen fantastic results and the tumor completely disappears. In others, this is not the case.”
Bottom Line
“I’m probably pretty cheap,” says Dr. Klopp, of University of Illinois. “The majority of the cost is the after care.”
· Most of brain tumor surgeries performed by Dr. Klopp, with follow up care, run about $2,000.
· Traditional veterinary radiation therapy costs approximately $2,200, thought the amount varies in different parts of the country.
Golden Moments: Fixing Phantom’s Pain
Phantom, a beautiful blue Persian show cat, had just celebrated his eleventh birthday two years ago when his owner Judy Miley noticed a problem. “When I showed him in the American Cat Fanciers Association (ACFA) he was the third best cat in the nation,” says Judy. “You get really close to your cat when you travel with him all the time. He’s just one of the family.”
So when Phantom suffered a seizure, she was concerned. “My vet really didn’t know what was causing them, and said just keep an eye on him.” Medication was an option if the seizures became frequent, but Phantom only had one more in October—and the five-month interval between the two episodes didn’t call for drugs.
“Then he started acting odd,” says Judy. “He’d give me very low, deep in his chest meows, telling me ‘Mom, help me,’ and he started hanging his head way down low when he walked, as if he