Does You Grey Have Oral Melanoma? Urgent! Please Check Them.

[Guest mar3]

I took my Carly into have a dental and was lucky to have a dentist vet that recognized an oral melanoma early. It was biopsied and then successfully removed before it spread. I had never heard of it and yet it is common and most dogs die from it because it spreads very fast. It is often never seen because of where it is inside the mouth. When it is usually found it is because the dog is having other symptoms usually related to the cancer spreading to the lungs. Please have your vet do a complete oral exam on your next vet visit or dental appointment. I wish I had known more about this before. Here is some cut and pasted info my vet gave me below.

 

 

 

Oral Melanoma

Oral malignant melanomas comprise about 30-40% of all malignant tumors in dogs, and occur most frequently in older, smaller, male dogs. Oral cancers are most common in cocker spaniels, Labrador retrievers, and other larger breeds. Common signs of oral melanoma are drooling (sometimes with bloody saliva), decreased eating, and halitosis (bad breath). Other signs may include coughing, difficulties in swallowing, and weight loss. Boxers also suffer from a vigorous development of tumor masses on their gums and around the teeth, which can pose physical problems during eating.

 

Oral melanoma tends to occur on the buccal mucosa, but may also be found on the gingival, palatine, or alveolar mucosa. Bony involvement of the cancer is variable when oral melanoma occurs on the latter three sites. The melanomas may be either pigmented or unpigmented, but the absence of melanin does not affect the prognosis. Tumors smaller than 1 centimeter in size offer the best prognosis, because larger melanomas often metastasize in the early stages to the regional lymph nodes, lungs, and other organs. If the dog is already has metastases at the time of diagnosis, the disease is advanced, and the prognosis is poor.

 

Oral melanomas are diagnosed by physical examination, with a biopsy, and radiographic studies.

 

Treatment of Melanoma

Surgical excision and radiation are used to treat oral melanoma in dogs. Because complete excision of the cancer is often difficult and tumor recurrence is common, the prognosis even after surgical excision is poor. The median survival time for dogs with oral melanoma is 8 months after diagnosis. Adjuvant therapies such as chemotherapy, immunotherapy, and experimental gene therapy are often applied because of the cancer's high rate of metastasis.

 

Antiangiogenic therapy is another potential novel treatment for canine melanoma. Early melanomas grow above the basement membrane of the skin and mucous membrane and are isolated from a blood supply. Invasive melanomas have induced angiogenesis, and they begin invading deeply into the local tissues. The tumor vascular channels permit melanoma cells to metastasize to other regions of the body. In human patients, a number of angiogenesis inhibitors have been studied in clinical trials, including Didemnin B, interleukin-12, and interferon alfa.

 

[ahicks51]

Did your vet make any mention of the vaccine for oral melanoma?

[feemandvm]

I would definitely recommend a follow-up appointment to consult with an oncologist. It takes 1,000,000 tumor cells to show up as a small spot on an x-ray, so negative x-rays does not mean that the cancer hasn't spread... it means either the cancer hasn't spread or that it did spread but at undetectable levels. My Greyhound had a clean x-ray when he was diagnosed with osteosarcoma but later did develop lung metastasis despite surgery and chemotherapy. Technically there was cancer in the lungs when we took his x-rays... it just wasn't at a detectable level.

 

Consult with an oncologist to see if the melanoma vaccine might be something worth pursuing.

[Guest mar3]

Yes, we are working with an oncologist and soft tissue specialist also. We aren't working with dentistry anymore. We are starting the vaccine in 2-3 weeks. She will get chest xrays every few months to confirm no cancer. Her melanoma was extremely small and the cells biopsied were graded as ones less likely to spread (they weren't dividing very fast) so the oncologist is very optimistic. Of course, you can never be 100% sure with cancer but so far everything is in her favor. The onocologist just mentioned how many dogs she sees that aren't diagnosed until it is too late because no one ever has a reason to do a mouth exam on there dog usually and that she sees so many dog go through treatment and die because of the stage of disease when caught.

[Guest crazy4greys]

Unfortunately one of our adopters lost her greyhound to that same thing. He was only 6.

 

Sending good thoughts and prayers to Carly.