Veterinary/zoology session

Those breeds of dogs, who tend to have the chondrodystrophic degeneration of the intervertebral disc – like the Dachshunds, Beagles, Pekineses and Cocker Spaniels –, have the greatest chance to come down with neurological diseases associated with spinal cord. These diseases are caused by an intervertebral disc protrusion between the ages three to six. In the older non-chondrodystrophic dogs the degeneration causes milder symptoms and it discloses different pathophysiological processes compared to chondrodystrophic degeneration. The veterinarian practice has to use different diagnostical imaging techniques to get to the exact diagnosis.

In the first part of my thesis I investigate the circumstances of the intervertebral disc protrusion, including the anatomical, biochemical, physiological characteristics, and the predisposing factors of the protrusion; in this way we could understand how the pathophysiological processes takes their effect. Then I summarize the clinical symptoms, the features of the diagnosis, the medical and surgical therapy, as well as the prognosis of the disease. In the second part I demonstrate the details on the attributes of the clinical diagnostical imaging procedures, with their benefits and disadvantages. Then I present the applied examination protocols and the aspect of judgment. I felt it necessary at the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) procedure to give more details about the physical aspects of the method – the characteristics of the X-ray imagery is widely known but for the correct evaluation of the MRI record we should know what kind of mechanisms take place in the background, and what is their regular effect on the final image.

In the last resort I analyzed the clinic’s database of the Faculty of Veterinary Sciences retrospectively from 1995 to 2008 and made a survey from it. Then I dealt with cases of those dogs that went to Kaposvar for the MRI procedure after the myelography. I got similar results to the relevant literature – the intervertebral disc protrusion occurred in the affected dogs at the age of four to nine, which had no sexual intercourse, and the protrusion mostly ensued in the section Th10-L3. The case reviews showed that while the myelography has variable results in the diagnosis of the pathological changes, on the one hand we could exclude some causative agents with the MRI procedure, on the other hand the MRI examination precisely showed in all cases the place of the protruded intervertebral disk.