Some lumps can spell big trouble for dogs and cats

In my last column, I noted that some scary-looking lumps on your pets may end up being nothing serious, and getting a proper diagnosis can allow you to get some sleep at night instead of worrying that something bad is going on.

This column looks at the other side of the coin - the lumps and bumps that can spell trouble, and how to deal with them.

The most common malignant mass I see on the surface of a dog's skin is a mast cell tumor. These often appear as raised pink lumps that sometimes increase and decrease in size rapidly. To the naked eye, mast cell tumors often look exactly like the benign histiocytomas we talked about two weeks ago. But when cells collected from the lump are placed under a microscope, the difference between the two is usually quite visible.

Most mast cell tumors can be cured by complete surgical removal if caught early. Once the tumor has grown to the size of a softball and has started rotting in the middle, however, it becomes considerably more challenging to remove and has likely had enough time to send out satellite tumors to far-reaching parts of the body, making cure with surgery impossible. When the tumor has spread, there is not a lot of effective medication or chemotherapy that will help for a long period of time, and death becomes inevitable.

Cats get mast cell tumors, too, but much less frequently than dogs, and theirs tend to be more benign, making them very likely to be curable with removal.

Any lump along the mammary chain in a female pet has potential to be a mammary tumor - the animal version of breast cancer. In dogs, about 50 percent of these lumps are benign and can be helped with surgery. But about 50 percent are aggressive, will recur after surgery, and will cause death because there is not much effective treatment.

Mammary tumors in cats are even more likely to be malignant.

Fortunately, we have a simple way of preventing mammary tumors: Female dogs and cats that are spayed before they go into heat for the first time (about 7 to 8 months old for dogs, and about 6 months for cats) develop mammary cancer at a rate of essentially 0 percent. And while spaying at a slightly older age can eliminate a host of reproductive problems down the road, it does not convey significant protection against the development of future mammary cancer. It breaks my heart to watch helplessly as an animal that was never intended to breed is consumed by mammary cancer just because nobody got around to spaying her for a few years.

When I see a dog come in for "lumps under the chin," I think first about lymphoma. This is the most common kind of cancer in dogs and cats, and in dogs it can cause the lymph nodes near the surface of the body to become enlarged.

A dog will often have a matching pair of firm swellings at the corner of the lower jaw and neck. Further examination often shows that the lymph nodes in front of the shoulders and behind the stifles are also enlarged. Often these lumps appear over the course of a few days to weeks.

Cats tend to hide their lymphoma inside their bodies, so prominent lumps on the outside are not a common tip-off for them.

Diagnosis can often be made with a needle aspirate of affected tissue or by removing an affected lymph node and sending it to a lab.

Lymphoma has a bit of a silver lining, because it tends to respond to chemotherapy better than just about any other type of cancer, and most pets tolerate the chemotherapy drugs without the terrible side effects that people often suffer. With aggressive treatment, we hope to be able to buy a year of good-quality life, but in the end the cancer always wins.

Without treatment, the average life expectancy after diagnosis is about one month.

This short list covers just a few of the more common lumps I see in practice, but there are thousands of things out there that cause visible lumps on pets. Is it a pocket of infection?

Is it a parasitic fly larva? Is it a glob of fat? Is it cancer?

In spite of apparent demand for it, I have yet to develop the skill of determining the composition of a lump over the telephone. But with an examination and a needle we can start getting down to the business of figuring it out and coming up with a plan to deal with it.

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Anne Pierce is a Colorado Springs veterinarian and co-owner of High Plains Veterinary Hospital, a Colorado Springs small-animal clinic. Reach her at petdocs@highplainsvet.com.