High-Tech Ways to Cure What Ails

Imagine if the late British author James Herriot were writing his stories about veterinary practice today. You’d still have the animals, of course: faithful old Fluffy, the arthritic golden retriever, creaking painfully to his feet; or Lolita, the lovable Lhasa apso, apt to shred curtains to tatters and deposit malodorous gifts on the rug when her mistress leaves the house. And you’d still have vets and owners who care deeply about their furred and whiskered charges.

But you’d have many other things too. Scores of human drugs adopted for use in pets--some developed especially for those pets. Pacemakers for dicey doggy hearts. Transplants for clapped-out kitty kidneys. Orthodontics, hip replacements, plastic surgery--little round implants, even, for neutered dogs whose owners prefer that “natural” look. To say nothing of items a trifle large for a roving veterinarian’s medicine bag: behemoth brain scanners, and dialysis and radiation therapy machines.

Never have owners been able to do so much for their four-legged family members, or spend so much. Never has pet medicine been so high tech, so similar to human medicine. Here’s a look at some of the latest advances--and a look, too, at what may be lurking just around the corner.

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Barney the boxer dog enjoyed one of the new fruits of veterinary medicine recently. Aches from an old back injury--plus a touch of arthritis--had him taking forever-and-again to get up from sitting down. And growling, too, at his younger playmates when they eagerly approached him for roughhousing. That just wasn’t Barney, says owner Wendie Thompson of San Juan Capistrano.

Barney’s vet gave Thompson something new: Rimadyl, a pain-killing drug from Pfizer Animal Health in Exton, Pa., approved for dogs by the Food and Drug Administration in December 1996. Thompson slipped the pills into Barney’s chow for a few weeks, enough to last till the soothing summer heat sizzled in. Thompson was delighted with the results.

“It put the pep back in his step,” she says.

Now it’s not as though pets had no pain pills before Rimadyl--vets commonly treat dogs with aspirin and other human drugs, often with good success. The same goes for other medical problems: These days, you’ll see pets on digoxin, beta blockers and ACE inhibitors for heart conditions, Prozac for obsessive fur licking and aggression. And that’s not the half of it. When all’s said and done, Gnasher the dog and Twinkletoes the cat are physiologically pretty similar to their two-legged owners.

Similar, but not the same, says Barney’s vet, Dr. Bernadine Cruz in Laguna Hills. Some drugs would knock people out at the proportional dose a dog gets. Others could be toxic to a pet at low doses--cats, in particular, are easily poisoned because their livers don’t metabolize drugs as well.

“Pets,” Cruz stresses, “are not just fuzzy little people.”

So even though vets know a lot about which drugs are safe, it’s great, they say, when medicines go through the hoops required for approval by the FDA: clinical trials for effectiveness and safety on the animal for which the pill is intended. In Rimadyl trials, 81% of dogs showed improvement (a small percentage developed gut irritation and liver toxicity, which can also develop with other painkillers). Today, about 1 million pooches have taken Rimadyl, mostly for osteoarthritis, a painful joint condition affecting one in five adult dogs.

Pets need a healthy body, but they also need a healthy mind--and in December, two more doggy drugs hit the news, both for doggy behaviors.

One drug, Anipryl, helps de-fog the minds of dogs with senile dementia. The other, Clomicalm, is for dogs who go nuts when they’re left alone. We mean really nuts. Dogs like Leffie.

A collie-shepherd mix, Leffie is a sweet, good-natured creature, though perhaps a tad skittish: He was always prone to nervously zig and zag on walks, and cower in the closet when he heard loud noises. After the tragic death of his owners, things got really bad.

“If you were in the house with him, he’d be a couch potato--but if you left him alone, he would totally panic,” says Marsha Miller, a San Fernando Valley volunteer with Adopt-a-Pooch, an organization that finds new homes for pets. “He would chew through doors. He would chew through fences--they’d look like a cannonball went through them. He was like a termite in fur.”

But Leffie is now happy and serene in a home--and Clomicalm, from Novartis Animal Health in Greensboro, N.C., helped him get there.

In humans, the drug--clomipramine--is prescribed for obsessive-compulsive disorders. In dogs, it’s been clinically shown to calm pets with separation anxiety, when combined with a training program.

Today, after two months on the drug, Leffie’s given up his zigging and zagging, and his termite tendencies are a thing of the past. (Though just to be safe, Miller placed him in a home with a cement-block backyard wall.)

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If lab-developed drugs can help clear up behavior problems, sometimes a pet’s own chemicals lend a hand. These days, vets can provide a product called Feliway, containing a chemical from feline scent glands, to dissuade kitties from odoriferously marking their territory. The same chemical is being tested for its soothing effect on cats, says Dr. Vint Virga, of Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine in Ithaca, N.Y.

“The hope is, it could be used to calm cats down when they go to the vet’s so they wouldn’t have to be as heavily medicated,” he says.

And better behavior modification techniques--ones tailored to fit the precise problem an animal is having--are also helping the pet with “issues.” Is a dog snapping at his owner because he thinks he’s top dog? Or is he just plain scared? Vet behaviorists try to figure out the root so they can design the best behavior program.

Eventually, though, for some unlucky dogs and cats, a time comes when something’s going on in the brain that no amount of behavior modification can correct: senility.

The condition--which may affect more than half of all dogs 11 or older, studies suggest--is similar to Alzheimer’s disease, although vets instead term it cognitive dysfunction syndrome. Brain cells are dying. Brain chemistry’s going awry. The pet gets confused, starts staring off into space, maybe snapping at its owner because it doesn’t remember them or defecating where it shouldn’t because it doesn’t know where it is.

Down in the brain, supplies of a key nerve chemical, called dopamine, are running short. Anipryl, another Pfizer drug--one that’s been used in humans to treat Parkinson’s disease--increases the supply, explains Dr. David Bruyette, medical director of the VCA Animal Hospital in West Los Angeles, and pioneering Anipryl researcher. In a trial of 199 dogs with dementia, 70% showed improvement after 12 weeks on the drug. It’s not a cure, says Bruyette--but it can buy extra time.

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Anipryl, Clomicalm, Rimadyl--all this new stuff for dogs. What’s going on? Are cats getting short shrift?

If cat drugs lag behind, say vets, that’s partly because it’s much trickier to bring human drugs into kitties, because of their super-sensitive livers. Rimadyl, for instance, would be a poison for a cat.

Cats are getting Anipryl, but the clinical studies were done on dogs, because IQ-testing a cat (an admirably uncooperative creature) is no easy business.

As for separation anxiety--well, cats don’t suffer from it as much, maybe because they’re solitary critters. In fact, dogs are generally more prone to behavior problems.

“There’s so many more things you have to do in order to make a dog a good pet--you can fall down in a lot of places,” says Dr. Gary Landsberg, veterinary behaviorist in Toronto.

Finally, when a dog is sick, you’re more apt to notice it.

“Dogs are very demonstrative when they don’t feel good,” says Cruz, the Laguna Hills veterinarian, “whereas cats will curl up into a little ball: ‘Maybe I do hurt, but I don’t go for walks with you anyway.’ ”

Such doggy centrism won’t go on, wagers Bruyette: There are more pet cats than dogs these days.

“We can’t ignore 59 million cats,” he says.

Cats, in any case, are ahead of the game in one veterinary arena: kidney transplantation.

That’s right. When cats’ kidneys fail, owners can now get replacements at several sites in the U.S., including the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine--the first such program--and the All-Care Animal Referral Center in Fountain Valley. The donors are stray or research cats, who give up just one of their kidneys. The deal: Cat parents have to adopt the donor. “Most people want the donor--they worship that cat,” says Dr. Clare Gregory, who runs the Davis program, where about 130 cats have had the operation to date, some flying in from as far as Japan.

The big problem is cost: Thousands of dollars for the transplant itself and $150 a month for life for rejection-fighting drugs, and that’s for a 10-pound cat. By the time you’re talking drugs for a 60-pound Labrador, you’re talking about $2,000, says Gregory--which is one reason the procedure’s rarely done in dogs. Another is the high rejection rate. For some reason, dogs’ immune systems are much more likely to view the new organ as an invading interloper.

New drugs are coming down the pike, says Gregory, ones that he and others are testing, and which could be powerful enough to end the doggy rejection problem.

Transplants, meanwhile, aren’t the only option for a pet with failing kidneys. Dialysis, or cleansing of the blood to remove fluid and toxins, is also available at Davis and several other sites around the U.S. (Davis plans another for San Diego County).

The Davis dialysis program began as a treatment for acute kidney failure, usually from antifreeze poisoning, common among dogs and cats. Today, though, says Dr. Larry Cowgill, who runs the program, the center sees many pets with chronic irreversible kidney failure--pets that must come several days a week, week after week. It gives owners something precious, says Cowgill--time to accept and say a graceful goodbye.

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Things are getting high tech, too, in other areas of animal health, such as cancer and joint repair.

These days, the knees of racehorses--which get such a drubbing during the animals’ careers--are being rebuilt with injections of cartilage into the joint. In fact, says Dr. Alan Nixon, associate professor of orthopedic surgery at Cornell, it’s now possible to grow horse cartilage from horse blood cells, and to boost that cartilage development, once inserted, with certain growth-promoting chemicals. Nixon is now experimenting with gene therapy, to try get the cartilage cells to make their own growth chemicals, and thus make even more cartilage.

The very same techniques that Nixon pioneered in horse medicine are spilling over into human medicine--and that’s happening with pet cancer therapies as well.

Cancer is a big concern for pet owners. In dogs, it’s the leading cause of death. It’s close to the top cause in cats.

“When I graduated 25 years ago, it was pretty much test and euthanize,” says Dr. Steven Withrow, head of clinical oncology at Colorado State University Veterinary Teaching Hospital in Fort Collins. “Today we have all the tools and toys available to any physician.”

Withrow’s particular contribution, in collaboration with Dr. Ross Wilkins, a Denver physician, is the development of a limb-sparing bone cancer surgery. Instead of amputating, vets remove just the cancerous part of bone and replace it with bone from a dead, donor animal (unlike kidneys, rejection isn’t an issue here). Withrow and Wilkins’ work has helped fine-tune the procedure in humans.

And there are lots of other developments on the pet cancer front. Scientists at Colorado State have developed a special diet that helps dogs better tolerate chemotherapy and radiation therapy. They’re involved in testing new drugs, including some of the latest hopes for human cancer therapies. There are national trials, headed by Duke University, to use heat to fight tumors. And at UC Davis, efforts are afoot to use gene therapy to combat rare dog brain tumors.

All in all, it’s a brave new world for animal medicine. And it’s changing all the time. It’s hard to imagine, but also very likely that one day all this newfangled stuff will seem as quaint and old-fashioned as Dr. James Herriot rattling his jalopy over the lonely Yorkshire dales.