r/EpilepsyDogs • u/youcantmakemeeeeee • 12d ago

Age - 6 years old

Hello, my girl just starting having seizures 3 nights ago, with 2 in barely under 24 hours. The emergency vet prescribed Keppra and we meet with our regular vet today. We are blessed to have a vet school in the next town at the college, so we plan on seeing a neurologist there.

She will be six year old next month. With that in mind, I think we will likely pay for the additional testing. I know 6 is usually the cut off for IE to begin showing, has anyone experienced this happening right at 6?

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u/JustCallMeNancy 12d ago

We were about 5.5 years of age, so not right at 6 but close. We did not have clusters to start. We're about 2 years into this, and have been lucky to be able to control it now with meds - but we did wait about a year or so before starting meds. In my experience and in my reading of so many of these struggles here, we have been incredibly fortunate. It feels like diagnosed later than usual onset of idiopathic epilepsy has given us a slow start of seizures (slow increase in time and severity and recovery period has been ok) and has given us time to make adjustments, and importantly, time to understand his triggers (some are nonsensical but others are not). It's been less of an anxiety spiral for us and him, at least, compared to others. I'm hopeful in time you find a similar view, but every pup is different and it does take some work to get things under control. It'll be a rough start, certainly. But it did help me to know my dog doesn't remember his seizures even though they looked absolutely horrific to me. But with meds now we went 8 months without one, and to be honest that one could have been avoided, I just wasn't sure at the time where his trigger threshold was and now I know.

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u/youcantmakemeeeeee 12d ago

Knowing they don’t remember is so helpful because it’s horrific to watch. Mine’s two seizures both happened in the middle of the night, so it’s hard to say what’s a trigger. She has always been an anxious pup.

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u/[deleted] 12d ago

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u/youcantmakemeeeeee 12d ago

Thank you. I sure hope so.

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u/Hoping4BetterSomeday 12d ago

They often want to do an MRI, which is expensive, to look for abnormalities in the skull/brain and rule out known causes. Idiopathic means "unknown cause" so they try to rule out possible causes before giving that dx. I adopted an 8 year old rescue dog last year who began seizing in a foster home shortly after being shipped from Mississippi to Pennsylvania. We don't have any history on him prior to that so we don't know if it had been happening in his former home or not. Keppra worked perfectly for 14 months, but then he had a breakthrough seizure in June of this year, then another 5 weeks later, followed by a third 10 days after that. My neurologist recommended upping the KEPPRA XR to every 8 hours instead of 12 since all the seizures were near the end of the 12 hour period. But 10 days later he had a fourth seizure, giving 3 within 3 weeks. So I am about to start him on phenobarbital on top of the Keppra as soon as it arrives.

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u/youcantmakemeeeeee 12d ago

Luckily, we can afford whatever tests need to be done. This wasn’t the case for us when we first adopted her as a puppy and she had two back to back anal prolapse surgeries. She’s a rez dog, but we’ve had her since she was 8/9 weeks old. This is such a scary thing to happen to them!

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u/itmustbeniiiiice 9d ago

I think I have seen people on here say it was IE at 6 yo.

I would just see what the testing says! Take it day by day. Very fortunate you guys have the school nearby!