Dogs & Seizures in children

[Guest guest]

Dogs credited with epilepsy alerts

Pets act before kids have seizures, survey finds

June 22, 2004

BY E.J. MUDDLE

HEALTHY NEWS SERVICE

Proving again that they're man's best friend, many dogs apparently have

the ability to alert families minutes or even hours before a child's

epileptic seizure.

What's more, a new study finds, many parents report protective action on

the part of their pet, such as gently sitting on toddlers to prevent

them from falling during a seizure.

Families related remarkable stories of some dogs' uncanny ability to

predict an attack and protect children from harm, said Dr. Adam ,

the lead author of the study and a pediatric neurologist at Alberta

Children's Hospital in Calgary, Canada.

Presenting their findings in the June issue of Neurology, Kirton and his

colleagues recounted incidents gleaned from interviews with 122

dog-owning families of children with epilepsy. Among their stories:

# Fifteen minutes prior to an epileptic attack in a young girl, an Akita

would forcibly push the child away from stairs to prevent her from falling.

# A sheltie-spitz crossbreed was consistently able to predict oncoming

seizures in a toddler and would sit on the child to prevent her from

standing before attacks.

# Sensing an attack later in the day, a Great Pyrenees would follow a

3-year-old for hours before a convulsion, without pausing for food or

drink. The same dog also would forcibly sit on the girl's 8-year-old

sister -- who also had epilepsy -- minutes before she had a type of

seizure that involved confused wandering.

In all, 40 percent of the dogs in the study displayed specific reactions

to a seizure, and about 15 percent of them appeared able to anticipate a

seizure, the researchers report.

The average time between a dog showing signs of pre-seizure behaviors --

activities such as face-licking, protective maneuvers or whimpering --

and the seizure itself was 2 1/2 minutes, although some dogs displayed

such behavior hours before an attack.

Female dogs were much more likely than males to be seizure-sensitive,

making up 80 percent of the pets capable of sensing an attack in advance.

Almost four out of five of the seizure-alerting dogs were from larger

breeds -- such as German shepherds, retrievers, rottweilers and standard

poodles.

Dr. Nordli, who directs the Epilepsy Center at Children's

Memorial Hospital in Chicago, said he has heard similar stories about

dogs and said the dogs could be cueing into some type of behavior change

in the child.

While a dog's keen sense of smell could pick up on subtle scent changes

in the child, " it's more likely that it's something that they are

seeing, " he said.

Nordli pointed out that many parents, especially mothers, have told him

that they, too, can sense when their child is about to have an epileptic

seizure.

" In some cases, it's through changes in the facial expression, or

coloring, " he said, " or sometimes the child's personality just seems

'off.' "

Among the dogs studied, the most common behavior exhibited by the

seizure-sensitive ones was a sustained licking of the child's face or body.

Although there's no proof to the theory, it's possible that this

behavior could be a " conditioned response by the dog to shorten or abort

a seizure, " the Alberta researchers wrote in their report.

Still, Kirton stressed that the findings are preliminary, and his group

was in no way advocating that parents of children with epilepsy get a

dog to protect their child from harm.

" Our recommendation at this point is that people with epilepsy get a dog

for the same reasons that anyone else would, " he said. " Further studies

are needed to see if dogs can be trained to detect seizures. "

That research may soon be under way. According to Nordli, the best

evidence that dogs can sense seizures would come from studies in which

scientists examined dogs' reactions to epileptic individuals hooked up

to an electroencephalograph, or EEG.

" We're thinking about doing that, " Kirton said.