How to effectively manage canine osteoarthritis

The following is a partial transcript of the video.

For many canine patients who enter the veterinary clinic, canine osteoarthritis (OA) is impacting the quality of their lives. Because it is a complex disease, a baseline treatment plan is an important part of managing the OA. But, where do you start?

During an interview with dvm360 at the Veterinary Meeting & Expo in Orlando, Florida, David Dycus, DVM, MS, CCRP, DACVS-SA, explained what an effective management plan of OA looks like to him.

David Dycus, DVM, MS, CCRP, DACVS-SA: I try to break it into 1 of 2 categories: do we have a patient that has osteoarthritis, but they're not clinically affected at that very moment? And that's where we might focus on our baseline efforts from weight management and daily exercise and joint supplementation with, say, omega-three fatty acids.

Versus if we have a patient with a flare-up, we're going to change our approach because they're painful and we have to get that flare-up under control, which is usually going to come in the form of analgesics with our top frontline being our anti-inflammatories, and then we might add in other oral pain medications or intra articular injections, or physical rehabilitation, really just anything we can do to get the flare up under control.