I am so sorry to hear your collie is so sick.

I had a 7 year-old Siberian husky with a brain tumor, and it was extremely hard. The seizures she was having were tiny and hard to see, so we had a real mystery on our hands. But if it is a brain tumor, prednisone may buy you a little more time because it shrinks the tumor.

I have read that collies are a little different as to medications they can handle and all, but I hope they can figure out what's wrong and give you a little more time, preferably without putting you in the poor house either.

Well it's morning and she is still just laying there with her mouth twitching a little, I don't know if she was able to sleep any. when I do try to move her she seems a little bit aware but I don't know how much.
I just don't really know what to do, she seemed to be improving a bit before bed last night, but she hasn't moved at all from where I layed her on her bed.
I will be calling the vet as soon as they open.
Any advice or thoughts will be greatly appreciated, Lisa

Lisa,

I'm so sorry for what you and Shelby are going through right now. Did your vet run a thyroid test? It isn't normally included in a regular blood panel, so you'd have to request it specifically, Uncontrolled hypothyroidism can sometimes cause seizures, but it is easily controlled with inexpensive meds. Ask your vet to run a thyroid test if it hasn't already been done.

Yes, collies can have dangerous hypersensitivities to drugs, so ask your vet if there's any possibility that the pheno is actually making things worse instead of better.

I am holding good thoughts for the best possible outcome.

Laurie

what laurie said,
this sounds like thyroid to me.

check the thyroid *pronto*, at once, right now, today.

Call your vet before you make the trip;
if he/she doesn't have the equipment on-site to analyze it right there, get a referral to someplace that does.

This is urgent.

I wish you the best.

The phenobarbitol is causing sedation, but it doesn't sound like it is controlling the seizure activity 100%. The twitching sounds like it could be a focal seizure. You need to immediately get her to a vet- the longer she has seizures the more likely she is to develop permanent brain damage or even die. There are other medications that can be used to stop the seizures, but most are injectible.

While we all love to test for hypothyroidism in seizure cases, it is not at all because hypothyoidism is a common cause of seizures. It is in fact a very rare cause of seizures. The reason we test for it is because we are usually getting blood anyway so the test doesn't cause any risk to the pet, and because if by some miracle the dog's seizure are caused by or exacerbated by hypothyroidism, it is easy to fix. We'd hate to euthanize a dog having seizures because it was hypothyroid, even if it is a rare cause.

That said, in older dogs with normal bloodwork (also pointing away from hypothyroidism), the most common causes of seizures are within the brain, such as tumors or space-occupying masses (abscesses, hemorrhage, etc). There are numerous infectious causes of seizures- fungal, protozoal, rickettsial, rarely heartworms, most of which have other clinical signs and cause changes in bloodwork as well as having the neurologic disease. Strokes can cause seizures depending on the part of the brain affected. Unfortunately none of these diseases are easily treated when the brain is involved, but some can be managed for a while at least. Another cause of seizures are toxins, but you would probably know if she got into anything.

Please, if you haven't already, take her back to the vet so she can get some relief.

I am thinking about you are your dog. Please keep us posted.

re:
hypothyroidism a rare cause of seizures:

Rare or not, I lost a Golden because the stupid vets kept giving her valium until there was no thyroid hormone left in her body.

For a solid week, Sunny lay in a cage at the clinic & had seizure after seizure while the vets told me they were doing everything possible.

Since a thyroid test had been done just a few months before, they didn't re-test.

When they called me to bring her home to die, saying that they were sorry, it was just something very sad that they couldn't help, I took her to another vet who leaned close to my dog & said, 'hmmm, smells like thyroid to me.'

which it was.

but it was too late.

I get so angry when some medical/dental/veterinary person says not to test because "it probably isn't this".

It doesn't matter what the odds are;
if the odds are 1 in 100, my dog might be that 1, & if the tests that had been run hadn't come up with a cause,
& my dog were having seizures, & a vet or vet tech dared to suggest not running a thyroid test because seizures from hypothyroidism were "rare", I'd get very serious very fast, & I don't think that vet or tech would be very happy about it.

but that test *would* be run, there or somewhere else.

My old cocker had a sudden onset of cluster grand mal seizures one night. They came completely out of the blue with no prior history of seizure activity of any kind. We rushed him to my vet who gave him valium and sent us home with pheno. He ran a standard blood panel which came back with everything within normal limits.

The next day after my brain kicked back in, I called my vet and told him I wanted a thyroid test run on Raggie. Luckily, he had blood left over from the previous night and ran the thyroid test with it. Sure enough, Raggie was hypothyroid. We started him on Thyroxine but had to also continue the pheno. He had no more seizures for more than a year until we lost him at age 18.

In spite of the fact that Raggie exhibited other signs of hypothyroidism (ragged, dull coat; sluggishness; and a propensity to gain weight easily), it never occurred to my vet to check his thyroid. If I hadn't insisted, I have no doubt we would have lost Raggie very soon after that first set of cluster seizures.

"Rare" or not, I'm a firm believer in checking the thyroid of dogs with seizures.

Laurie

...just had this thought.

For years upon years, the prevailing medical "knowledge" was that women didn't have heart problems, heart disease, heart attacks.

When women dropped dead, their doctors said things like, "her heart just gave out", as though it was a surprise.

When they actually began to check, dadgum if women didn't have heart problems & dadgum if they didn't start surviving longer when they got treatment & medication.

I wonder how many pet deaths have been called something else because it just wasn't statistically likely that it was thyroid.

& of course it *would* be statistically unlikely if almost all other thyroid deaths had been attributed to something else.

From the link provided below "Researchers at Tufts University report that 77 percent of the dogs with seizure disorders that they studied had thyroid dysfunction."

I did not read the study (and don't intend to), so I do not know how the dogs were selected or how the study was carried out, but this does make it sound as if thyroid disorders are an important cause of seizures.

Here is a link that might be useful: Canine epilepsy page

Correlation does not equal causation.

The researcher in the study (Dr. Dodd) never stated that hypothyroidism was a cause of seizures, only that there was a correlation. I'll wager that the dogs in the study had teeth, so does having teeth cause seizures? Of course not.

The dogs in the study were selected for abnormal behavior (aggression, fearful, seizures, hyperactive). Of the 634 dogs in the study, 189 (30%) had seizure disorder. Of them, 77% had thyroid dysfunction, but the study does not state what the thyroid dysfunction was. Dogs can be hypothyroid (most commonly due to autoimmune thyroiditis), hyperthyroid (rare, most likely due to thyroid carcinoma), or euthyroid sick due to any other disease. The study does not say if ANY of the dogs were worked up for any other diseases besides thyroid dysfunction. It is very possible that some dogs had more than one disease, but this is not mentioned in the study.

Of all the seizure dogs, it was mentioned that only 2 were supplemented. These dogs were just past puberty, which is the typical age to have a single seizure (as my own Anastasia did). Therefore the seizures may have stopped on their own. The thyroid supplementation was never discontinued to see if seizures returned, so I don't see how anyone could conclude that the thyroid supplement cured the seizures.

There have been no cause and effect studies for hypothyroidism and seizures that I could find. It wouldn't be too hard to cause hypothyroidism in dogs and see how many develop seizures. I searched for hypothyroidism-induced seizures in other species including humans and found nothing, which is odd. Usually a disease causes similar symptoms across species, but not always.

I believe that in cases of sudden hypothyroidism that seizures can happen. I don't think it is that common, but it happens.

The study DOES suggest full thyroid testing for any dog with aberrent behavior, which I 100% agree with. I also still agree with testing for hypothyroidism in seizure cases, because you may get lucky.

Phenobarbital lowers T4 level, so if any of the seizure dogs in the study were already on phenobarb, it is possible that they were hypothyroid because of that medication. I do not think this was known at the time the study was done. The study doesn't say anything about the seizure dogs being treated in any way. Another reason to test thyroid function for seizuring dogs prior to phenobarb is because of this phenomenon. It is sometimes difficult to decide if patient was hypothyroid prior to starting phenobarb or not. Knowing beforehand clears up any potential confusion once phenobarb has been started, sort of.

Another study showed that euthyroid sick syndrome may be CAUSED BY epilepsy.

Yet another study proved that phenobarb cause hypothyoidism in some dogs.

I never said that hypothyroidism does not cause seizures, only that it is rare. I am well aware of the previous situation here where a regular poster saved the life of a seizuring dog by suggesting hypothyroidism as a cause. It is the one and only case I have ever heard of. In an older dog the odds are that the cause of seizures are intracranial, not hypothyroidism, especially in light of no clin path abnormalities suggestive of hypothyroidism. Supplementing while waiting for a thyroid panel wouldn't be harmful and if it helps, great- I'd do it myself in this situation. I would also be realistic with the owner and tell them that hypothyroidism isn't the most likely cause of this dogs seizures, that in dogs that present this way the cause is usually intracranial and more difficult to treat, and I would recommend further diagnostic to find out exactly what is going on in order to get a prognosis.

Here is a link that might be useful: The oft-misunderstood Tufts study

Make sure that your vet (or your next vet) has ruled out hypoglycemic seizures caused by extremely low blood sugar levels.

I know you said that the blood tests came back normal, but I would specifically ask about this. We just lost a beloved 15-year-old Jack Russell Terrier to (probable) pancreatic cancer which was causing the blood sugar instabilities that were causing the seizures. (We chose not to prod and poke her to confirm the cancer diagnosis because she had a number of other chronic medical conditions and had lived a long and happy life.)

Based on great advice from some people on this forum, we put my old pal on an every-4-hour around-the-clock feeding schedule of small meals that included cooked plain brown rice. (We were cooking so much rice so often that we even wore out the old rice cooker during this period.) The idea being that the complex carb would steady out her blood sugar levels and give her a nice clean steady burn.

Worked very well - once we got her onto the new feeding schedule (which she LOVED!!!), she would start seizing only once or twice a week instead of almost every day, and she only had one major seizure, which kicked in because she was in another room and I missed the signs that one was on the way (eyebrow twitching, in her case.)

I work from home so was able to keep a close eye on her and give her a spoonful or two of Karo syrup (or a squirt of icing in a tube - MUCH neater :o) whenever I saw a seizure starting, which generally defused it and stopped it entirely within a few minutes.

She had a pretty good final few months, although she was obviously going slowly downhill. We got to enjoy and appreciate her, say an extended goodbye, and have some fun final outings. I was in the usual dilemma of "how do you decide when to put down a sick and dying but relatively functional and still very happy dog", when one day she gave me "the look", and I knew. I called and made an appointment with the vet, and a few days later, we both took the day off and cooked up some filet mignons on the Weber grill - gave her one all her own, and shared the other (husband, me, other dog, and cats.) We went for one last gentle stroll with her in a favorite park, and then... I achieved my goal of sparing her any further major seizures and getting her into the vet's (who she loved to visit) under her own power and in good spirits. We buried her ashes under the bricks on the patio where the grill lives, right next to the ramp into the swimming pool (2 of her favorite places :o).

Sorry for rambling on, but I miss my old friend so much. But do check on the hypoglycemic seizure angle - as I said, it's manageable, at least for a time, depending on the underlying diagnosis.

Sending good thoughts to all of you.

Susan

In a new post I put, just to let everyone know:
My sweet Collie Shelby that was having seizures died today. I could not stand to see her in such pain & not even recognizing us & she was not able to even stand or sit up at all. The vet did every test & everything they could to bring her back, but I guess it was just her time to go. It was the 1st time I have had to do this with a beloved pet, but the strange part was after it was all over I felt a calming peace come over me, like I was being told she was fine & in a better place.
Thanks for all your help & support, Lisa

Correlation does not equal causation.

No one said it did. What people are saying - and this is supported by the study and by your very own arguments - is that IF the dog is suddenly having seizures (or other behavioural changes), checking for thyroid dysfunction is a reasonable approach.

Lisa, I am so sorry to hear about Shelby. Seizures are awful to witness. Sometime it's just time, and we the caretakers have to make that difficult decision. I know exactly what you mean about the calming peace you felt afterward. We felt the same way after putting down our old girl. Relief that her pain and our turmoil were over. Now you can cry, sleep, raise a toast, whatever it takes to grieve and honor the bond you two shared. And you can start remembering all of the good times again, instead of the pain and fear of the past few days. You did a good thing, but it's a hard thing for sure.

Susan

Lisa, I am so sorry to hear about Shelby's seizures and your loss. ((((hugs))))