Cancer isn’t as common for horses as it is for humans and dogs and cats. And because equine cancer symptoms—weight loss, nausea, lethargy, loss of appetite, lameness, skin and coat conditions, among others—often don’t start appearing until the cancer has advanced, it can be hard to reverse its progression. For years, chemotherapy has been veterinarians’ go-to treatment for fighting the disease.
But is chemotherapy effective and should doctors recommend it?
“Chemo for horses can be quite expensive,” says Daniela Luethy, an internal medicine lecturer at New Bolton Center, who, along with her Penn Vet colleagues might see as many as 50 equine lymphoma cases a year. “We don’t want to recommend a costly but ineffective treatment.”
Luethy tackled the chemo effectiveness question in a retrospective study published earlier this year in the Journal of Veterinary Internal Medicine. Looking at cases from 1991-2017, the research documents long-term outcomes for horses with lymphoma who were treated with chemo.
Luethy’s research focuses on 15 horses with different types of lymphoma at different stages of progression. “The results are encouraging,” Luethy says. The retrospective study poses opportunities for further research with more case control, including comparisons of mixes of multiple chemotherapy drugs and tracking responses when chemotherapy is used in conjunction with a steroid.
Read more at Penn Vet News.
