Dr Braden removing a tumour from a cat.
If you find a lump on your dog, should you get it checked by a vet or just keep an eye on it for a while? What if it feels like another lump your dog has? Can you tell what it is just by feeling the lump?
The short answer is you need to have any lump checked by a vet, and the sooner the better.
The problem with diagnosis what type of lump is present is it is impossible to be certain if it is cancerous or not without looking at the cells under the microscope. Even for very experienced vets, we can sometimes be fooled if we don’t take a sample to examine.
The question we always ask ourselves when we see any sort of lump is “what is it and where is it?”
When we examine a lump, we need to work out what type of lump it is (inflammatory, benign or malignant), and from there we can work out a treatment plan as we have an idea about how the lump will behave.
The first thing I will do with most lumps is called a fine needle aspirate. This involves putting a small needle into the lump (the needle I use is the same size I use to vaccinate pets) and removing some cells to examine under the microscope. For many types of lumps, we can tell there and then what type of lump it is and what treatment options will be best. For cases where we can’t tell what type of lump is present, we may send the sample to a specialist pathologist, or recommend a larger sample (a biopsy) be sent to the lab for examination.
For many lumps, we may feel that “doing nothing” is the best treatment course. For example, the most common lump we diagnose on dogs is a lipoma, which is a benign (the good type) tumour of the fat cells. For these tumours we rarely recommend surgery as we know they don’t spread and will normally stop growing at some point, so they can normally be left and monitored. In other cases, the surgery may cause the animal so much pain or dysfunction that it is not in the animal’s best interest.
If we are concerned the lump is malignant (the bad type), we may recommend a process called “staging”. This is where we examine the rest of the body for signs of the tumour having spread using tools such as ultrasound, xrays or CT scans. After all, there is no point removing the lump we can feel if it has already spread to other parts of the body. Cancers tend to be fairly predictable in where they spread, so when we know what type of lump is present, we know where to search for signs of spread.
The location of any lump can also influence our treatment choices. For example, a lipoma on the side of the abdomen may not cause any problems and might be left, but one under the armpit might cause some problems and need to be removed. A malignant tumour on the side of the chest where dogs have more skin might be quite easy to remove, while the same type of lump near their paw might be very difficult to treat as there is very little “spare” skin to close the wound once the lump is removed.
So why do we need to examine a lump quickly?
The two things that may change with time are the size of the lump and whether it has spread or not.
By “keeping an eye” on a lump, it may be bigger by the time we see it. This makes any surgery to remove the lump more extensive, more painful, more difficult and more expensive.
We know that most tumours take a certain period of time to spread to other parts of the body. By waiting to see what a lump does means it may spread before we have a chance to treat it, which could cost your pet its life.
To request an appointment to have a lump examined (or for any other problem), head to http://bunburyvets.com.au/new-clients/appointment-request-form/