Mike: Hello, I’m doctor Mike, today, we’re going to talk about lumps and bumps. It is not
uncommon to find one or more lumps on your dog or your cat. While many lumps and bumps
maybe benign, others may actually be cancerous. To learn more about lumps and bumps, we’re
going to meet with doctor Mona Rosenberg, who’s board certified in veterinary oncology.
Mona: It’s very common for you to feel a lump or a bump or sometimes many lumps or bumps
on your pets. And it’s very important for you to be very aware of what your animal’s body
actually feels like. Most of the time these are not going to be a big deal, but they should always
be evaluated by your family veterinarian. In fact, what most of us do is keep a map, so that you
could keep track of any new lump or bump that shows up. My personal opinion is that if a lump
or a bump is there for more than 3-5 days, it should be evaluated. But should it be cancer, we all
know that early detection is imperative at providing better outcomes. The last thing we wanna do
is just to take a wait and see approach. Cancer can feel like anything, I can't tell just by feeling a
lump or a bump on your pet whether it’s benign or malignant. Even if one has been tested and we
know that it’s just fatty lump, another one could feel just like it and be something quite more
dangerous. Fine needle aspiration, where we take a small needle, suck some cells out of the lump
or bump, then look at them microscopically, is accurate about 80 percent of the time in
determining whether this lump or bump is benign or malignant. In some instances, your family
veterinarian may feel that a fine needle aspirate is not going to give an adequate answer to our
question as to whether or not more needs to be done for this lump or bump that we find. The next
step is to take a small surgical biopsy, sometimes even just under local anesthesia, in order to get
more information. By taking a core of tissue out of that lump or bump, the pathologist now has
the architecture of the cells from one to the next versus the fine needle aspirate, where we’re
squirting these cells on a slide and sometimes we lose then that architecture. And that can be
important in our determining whether this is cancerous or not. As a board certified veterinary
oncologist, having treated pets with cancer for almost 22 years, I find that there’s some
misconception about the word cancer. Cancer is defined by a collection or abnormally growing
cells. It doesn’t describe what the behavior of those cells are, only that they’ve lost their normal
regulation so they keep dividing uncontrollably, that what turns it into a lump or bump. Now
lumps or bumps can be benign or they can be malignant. A benign tumor is a tumor that if we
can successfully cut it out in its entirety, it is not going to come back and it is not going to
spread. If we can't cut it out, unfortunately, it can continue to grow and then cause a deterioration
in your pets quality of life. There are other things that we can do besides surgery if it’s in a
location that’s not amenable to surgery such as radiation. Malignant cancers however are much
more aggressive, and in that setting, even if we cut them out they often will come back in the
same or similar location or have the ability to metastasis or spread to vital organs. That’s when
we would then see deterioration in quality of life. Today we made significant advances in the
treatment of cancer in patience, so that by using chemotherapy, radiation, surgery and a variety
of other oral medications, we can provide your pet with an outstanding quality of life for an
extended period of time regardless of the diagnosis.
Mike: Doctor Rosenberg gave us an excellent overview of lumps and bumps. It is important to
understand that benign and cancerous lumps can feel exactly the same. If your veterinarian
diagnosed a lump as benign and your pet develops one or more similar lumps, you cannot
assume that they are all benign. You should bring it to the attention of your veterinarian who has
the ability to examine and to test each to determine if they are cancerous or not. Remember, early
detection is key to the best prognosis. I’m doctor Mike, I hope that this information is helpful
and thanks for watching.
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