Seizures are a scary and often unpredictable problem that affects both people and pets. Both cats and dogs can have seizure activity over varying severity. Most seizure activity involves the entire body where pets fall on their side, are unresponsive, paddle their legs, drool excessively, vocalize, and often lose control of their bowels. Some pets can have seizure activity that is localized to one part of their body (facial twitching, twitching of one leg, etc). Most seizures are generally limited to approximately 30 seconds to a minute and a half.

After the active seizure is over, a post-seizure phase (called postictal behavior) can affect the patient for up to a few hours or a day post-seizure and includes behavior such as confusion, disorientation, pacing, anxiety, panting, and even blindness. If your pet is experiencing seizure activity, understand that they are not aware of their surroundings during the seizure and can bite you in the process. It is important to protect them from their surroundings and transport them to a veterinary hospital after their seizure activity ceases. You can scoop them up with a large blanket to protect yourself from injury.

Due to the wide variety of disease process that can cause seizure activity including low blood sugar (hypoglycemia), toxins, head trauma, metabolic disease (kidney/liver disease), structural brain disease, or infection/inflammation within and around the brain, diagnostics are recommended to determine the underlying cause. Diagnostics often include bloodwork, liver function testing and a consultation with a veterinary neurologist for an MRI and spinal tap. After performing these diagnostics, your pet may be diagnosed with idiopathic epilepsy (seizures of unknown origin

Pets with a seizure disorder should be treated with anti-seizure (anti-convulsant) medication to attempt to prevent future seizure activity. Anti-convulsant therapy will not eliminate seizure activity but will hopefully decrease the frequency and severity of seizure activity. Sometimes pets require multiple anti-convulsant medications to control their seizure activity. Some veterinarians have differing opinions on when to begin seizure medication, but in general, if your pet is suffering from more than one seizure every two months or if they are experiencing “cluster” seizures (two or more seizures in a 24 hour period), it is recommended that you begin medical therapy for seizure control.

Many seizure medications need to be monitored through frequent blood work in order to maintain an appropriate therapeutic level of the anti-seizure medication in the blood and ensure the body is handling the new medication appropriately. When first beginning medical management it can take some adjustment in dosage to find the correct dosing schedule for each patient to sustain therapeutic levels of mediation and ensure the seizures are controlled.

Austin Veterinary Team
Latest posts by Austin Veterinary Team (see all)