Background: Little is known regarding the comorbidities and prognostic factors associated with the long-term outcome of ischemic stroke in dogs. Although poststroke epilepsy is a well-recognized syndrome in people, it is unclear if this phenomenon also occurs in dogs.
Hypothesis/objective: Document comorbidities, long-term outcome (survival and stroke recurrence), and occurrence of epileptic seizures associated with ischemic stroke.
Background: Syringomyelia (SM) is a prevalent inherited developmental condition in Cavalier King Charles Spaniels (CKCSs) with Chiari-like malformation (CM), accompanied by a variety of clinical manifestations, including signs of neuropathic pain. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is the gold standard in SM diagnosis. However, it is desirable to establish clinical predictors that can identify CKCSs with a large clinical syrinx that needs treatment, as some owners cannot afford or lack access to MRI.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Meningoencephalitis of unknown origin is a common cause of severe neurological disease in dogs. The term covers a heterogeneous group of noninfectious inflammatory diseases, with immune dysregulation widely accepted as the underlying disease mechanism. Current treatment consists of immunosuppression, with corticosteroids being the mainstay of virtually all treatment regimens.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Non-infectious inflammatory diseases of the central nervous system in dogs, such as steroid responsive meningitis-arteritis (SRMA) and meningoencephalitis of unknown origin (MUO), represent a common clinical challenge that needs extensive and multimodal work-up to reach a presumptive diagnosis. Both diseases are presumably caused by dysregulations of the immune system, but further research is needed in order to understand the molecular mechanisms behind each disease and to optimize treatment.
Methods: By next-generation sequencing and subsequent quantitative real-time PCR (qPCR) verification, we designed a prospective case-control pilot study to analyze the small RNA profiles of cerebrospinal fluid from dogs suffering from MUO ( = 5), dogs suffering from SRMA ( = 8), and healthy dogs ( = 5) presented for elective euthanasia used as the Control group.