When the bad news is your dog has cancer, the good news is there are many treatment options that may help your pup conquer or live with the cancer. While there is no definitive cure for many inva sive or systemic cancers, more treatments are being developed and approved every day that will potentially slow or stop the progression of cancer, according to Rodney Page, MS, DVM, director of the Comparative Cancer Program at the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine. In other instances treatments can put the cancer into remission.
Page adds that some leukemias can be controlled by chemotherapy for one to two years.
For example, there is a 75 to 80 percent success rate of remission when treating lymphoma with chemotherapy. Quality of life Like their human companions, dogs that get cancer, which is an uncontrolled growth of cells that may spread to other sites, can receive treatments designed to kill existing cancer cells and prevent new ones from developing. Of course, quality of life means different things to different people, and since the dog can't speak for himself it's a decision an owner will have to make using his or her best judgment. For example, one person may look at quality of life as minimizing the symptoms, while others may view quality as providing a return to the level of health and activity prior to the diagnosis. Dogs generally tolerate the treatments better than their human counterparts, and in particular recover from surgery much more rapidly.