The physical exam approach to the neurologic patient

In this episode, Anne Chauvet, DVM, DACVIM, CHT-VT, shares insights with our host Adam Christman, DVM, MBA, and listeners from her extensive career treating neurological conditions.

Chauvet also explores the importance of distinguishing clinical symptoms from radiographic findings in disc disease, especially in prone breeds, the complexities of brain tumors in aging dogs, highlights MRI as a key tool for precise diagnosis, and more throughout the episode.

Below is a partial transcript

Anne Chauvet, DVM, DACVIM, CHT-VT: The big thing I tell veterinarian, just remember, when you're thinking about brain tumors, they don't usually happen unless you have a certain age. Now, I'm going to have a caveat in that that the youngest one I've had was 3 1/2 year old with a little Jack Russell, but usually it's 4 years and older. So if you have a 2 1/2 and a half year old little dog that begins seizuring, so therefore has a cortical lesion in the brain, the odds of that being a brain tumor are pretty darn low to none. If you have a 9-year-old pit bull, you have a much greater chance of having a brain tumor over idiopathic epilepsy. So you're going to make your decisions on whether you work up or not, or how far you can push your client for that. So the signs you're going to see are dependent entirely on the anatomy. So if I section out the brain, the front is going to be usually seizures.

The cortex is very prone to seizure, particularly in what we call the Piriform lobe, which is the part of the brain that on each side of the brain will turn around, curl towards the midbrain that's very prone to seizure, and it's a lovely place for gliomas to launch themselves in all those pit bulls, Bulldogs, they tend to have a lot of gliomas. Boxers famous for it as well. So that's an area that often gets seizures. Then you look at things like midbrain, we see a lot of midbrain problems with pituitary tumors. Those are more of the dog that's very dull, aimless walking is going to kind of start running into things that often people label it for senility. Be careful with that senility label, because if you overlook it. It might be too late for us to be able to help the patient.