In the human and animal world, cancer is a frightening and horrible disease to encounter however similar to humans, there are numerous treatment options and in many cases, higher chances of cures for our pets. The very threat of cancer would be one of the many reasons to make sure your pets are insured. Although there are great things we can now do to cure our pets of cancer, like humans, they are potentially expensive and have no guarantee of success. Every single week all veterinary clinics would have clients compromise on the best treatments available or not treat at all, due to the potential costs involved.

As veterinarians, we are delighted to be able to give a fighting chance to pets with serious illness, hence our strong advice that all pets be insured. As stated in our section on lumps, the best thing you can do is have any new lump checked out early because this gives the best chance of getting a positive result. Unfortunately many cancers start internally and the first sign may be an unwell patient. What options do we have for treating cancer in our pets? All the following are available:

• Surgical Excision (The mainstay of treatments)
• Chemotherapy
• Radiation

Before the above considerations, a diagnosis of exactly what the cancer is would be advised. Depending on the type of cancer we can recommend which procedures will give the best results.

Surgery

This is still the number one way to potentially cure a cancer. Depending on our level of suspicion we may recommend an initial surgery with a reasonable margin of tissue, and then consider sending it to pathology to identify exactly what it is. The advantage of a pathology report is that if a tumour comes back a lot more aggressive than we may have anticipated, a second more aggressive surgery or perhaps chemotherapy or radiation done now, gives a much greater chance of cure than waiting until the mass returns – at which time our chance of cure is significantly less.

Occasionally we may recommend a surgical biopsy of the mass first. The advantage of this is to see if we need a more aggressive surgery from the start. The disadvantages are increased cost and the need for two anaesthetics.

Chemotherapy

Many dog and cat tumours these days are amenable to various forms of chemotherapy. Chemotherapy may give some chance of curing the cancer, or may just delay the cancers return for a significant period of time. At this stage, our chance of curing cancer with chemotherapy is not as good as human chemotherapy, however the good news for cats and dogs is that the side effects we suffer are not nearly so bad for our pets because they tolerate chemotherapy a lot better that we do.

Radiation

Similar to chemotherapy, radiation is increasingly available to us as a weapon against cancer, and may potentially cure, or at least give a lot more quality time with a happy pet.

We recommend every new lump gets examined when first noticed. As we all know, the main concern with a “lump” is that it may be a cancer of some sort. The mistake people make is leaving a lump because “it wasn’t causing him any concern”.

Here’s the thing about cancer. When the cancerous lump is causing your pet some sort of concern, it’s often too late to cure. Cancerous masses often don’t affect the patient at all for quite some time as it continues to get larger. Hence if you notice any new lump, get it looked at and examined immediately. Often times lumps are benign or just cysts, or fatty deposits. But if there is a concern over a particular lump, then the earlier the intervention the better.

Within a consultation there may be a degree to which a veterinarian is concerned about a lump. Depending on this level of concern we may recommend monitoring, removal (plus or minus histopathology), or biopsy first and then removal with a degree of aggressiveness that depends on the biopsy result. Ultimately there is no absolute right or wrong about what to do with each individual case, but a process to go through depending on our level of concern.

When you see your vet for a new lump, most times we will do what’s called a fine needle aspirate. This is a simple initial test whereby we will get a small sample by inserting a fine needle into the lump. If what we get looks a little suspicious, we can stain it on the spot and have a look under a microscope. If we are concerned over seeing suspicious looking cells we will then discuss the merits of lump removal, or possible biopsy first to see exactly what it is that we are dealing with.

Fine Needle Aspirate Versus Biopsy

We often hear our clients say that they had a “biopsy” of a lump when in fact what they had was a fine needle aspirate as described above. There is a very definite difference. The fine needle aspirate is not nearly as accurate as a biopsy and merely gets a few representative cells – if we’re lucky. These can be identified as cancer by a pathologist but most time the pathologist will not be able to determine how nasty that cancer is. For that they will need a “biopsy”. A biopsy is defined as a “piece” of the tumour rather than just a few cells. For this we need to fully anaesthetise the patient and actually cut out a representative wedge of the suspicious lump. From this the pathologist has a much greater chance of actually identifying the exact nature of the tumour.

Depending on a clinicians degree of concern over a particular lump, this may be recommended before surgical removal.