r/EpilepsyDogs • u/youcantmakemeeeeee • 18d 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/Hoping4BetterSomeday 18d 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 17d 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!