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Peer-reviewed veterinary case report

Detecting dog mammary tumors using oral 5-aminolevulinic acid

By Osaki, T et al.·Published in Veterinary and comparative oncology·2017·Joint Department of Veterinary Clinical Medicine, Japan·View original on PubMed

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Original publication title: Photodynamic detection of canine mammary gland tumours after oral administration of 5-aminolevulinic acid.

Species:
dog

Plain-English summary

A group of dogs with mammary gland tumors were given a special substance called 5-aminolevulinic acid (5-ALA) to see if it could help detect their tumors more effectively. After taking the 5-ALA, the tumors showed a bright red fluorescence when examined, which was not seen in healthy tissue. This suggests that 5-ALA could be a useful tool for veterinarians to identify and diagnose mammary tumors in dogs. The study indicates that this method might improve how we detect these tumors, potentially leading to better treatment options.

People also search for: dog mammary tumor detection · 5-ALA for dog tumors · canine mammary gland cancer treatment

Abstract

5-Aminolevulinic acid (5-ALA) is widely used in photodynamic detection (PDD) and therapy. We evaluated the pharmacokinetics of 5-ALA-induced porphyrins and its effectiveness in PDD in dogs with mammary gland tumours (MGTs) following oral administration. Healthy dogs and those with MGTs (nine each) were orally administered 4 mg kg5-ALA. Protoporphyrin IX (PpIX) was not detected in the plasma of healthy dogs but it peaked in dogs with MGT at 2 h after 5-ALA administration. In the PDD study, 16 dogs with MGT were orally administered 40 mg kg5-ALA, and MGT but not normal tissue showed red fluorescence after 2-4 h. Photon counts were 6635-63 890 and 59-4011 (median, 19 943 and 919) for MGT and non-tumour tissues, respectively. Cell density strongly correlated with PpIX photon counts of MGT tissue of the dogs (R = 0.743, P = 0.0009). We suggest that 5-ALA-PDD might be an effective diagnostic tool for MGTs.

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Original publication on PubMed: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26766288/