LSU Vet Med provides hedgehog with life-saving treatment

BY WILL NICKEL @WilNickel

Near Tiger Stadium there’s a brand new building that houses a room with 9-foot-thick cement walls, encasing a $1.2 million machine that can shoot ultra-powerful beams of radiation.

And in the center of it all, there’s a hedgehog.

LSU’s Stephenson Pet Clinic is the only full-service cancer center that sees animals in Louisiana. All kinds of animals, from cats and dogs to birds and hedgehogs, are brought to the clinic to receive the same cancer treatments that are used on humans: chemotherapy and radiation therapy.

Betty, a four-year-old hedgehog who is affectionally referred to as Queen Betty, was one of the animals treated for cancer at LSU’s pet clinic.

“Even though cancer in small exotics like hedgehogs hasn’t been extensively studied like in cats or dogs, the LSU team did above and beyond,” said Sunny Tran, Betty’s owner. “Betty is a fighter, and despite the nature of cancer treatments, I believe they were extremely successful in securing her more happy months or years with me.”

Betty first came into LSU’s pet clinic because Tran noticed her gums were bleeding. The initial diagnosis was gingivitis.

However, Tran then noticed lumps growing on her jaw and took her in a second time. This time, the biopsy diagnosed the swelling on the bottom of her jaw as oral squamous cell carcinoma, a type of cancer that forms inside the mouth.

Oral squamous cell carcinoma is a particularly aggressive form of cancer, according to Dr. Laken Russell, a zoological medicine and surgery resident at LSU.

“It was a very malignant form of cancer. Typically, if you try to perform a surgical procedure to remove it, it just aggravates the mass,” Dr. Russell said. “Whenever you try to remove it, you need good margins around the mass, meaning try to find an area that’s unaffected. In a hedgehog, achieving good margins can be difficult.”

Betty was given a CAT scan to see the extent of the growth and if it could be operated on. After discussions between Tran and the small animal surgeons, a plan for Betty to have surgery to remove part of her right jaw was made.

The surgery was a success but left a hole in the bottom of Betty’s jaw that she periodically pokes her tongue out of.

“She has a little permanent derp face,” Dr. Russell said.

Despite missing part of her jaw, Betty retained good usage of her tongue and mouth and was still able to eat on her own.

“I was worried we’d have to feed her through a tube all the time, but she proved otherwise,” Tran said.

Even though the surgery went well, the doctors at the pet clinic knew it was unlikely they achieved the margins needed to keep the cancer from returning due to Betty’s small size. A few months after the surgery, more cancerous masses started to form on her upper jaw. Betty would need more treatment.

Dr. Jayme Looper, one of only 129 radiation oncologists in the world, oversees the cancer treatments of animals at the pet clinic and said that the next step for Betty was radiation therapy.

“Unfortunately, the new tumor was inoperable,” Dr. Looper said. “We had to do a few rounds of radiation on her.”

For radiation treatment, animals are given anesthetic before being brought to a room called The Vault. The Vault earns its name because of the thickness of its walls. Each wall is 9-foot thick to keep the people outside of the room from receiving any unnecessary radiation.

In the center of the vault sits the pet clinic’s radiation machine, a large lump of machinery that is like an x-ray machine, only more powerful.

The first three rounds of radiation went well, but the fourth round experienced one small hiccup: Betty died.

“She had an unremarkable physical exam and was doing well under anesthesia until, abruptly, she was not,” Dr. Russell said. “She crashed and her heart stopped beating.”

The clinic’s staff quickly began to perform CPR on Betty using a thumb and index finger for chest compressions. The CPR was successful and restarted Betty’s heart.

“We saved her. We got her back in under two minutes,” Dr. Russell said. “She was breathing on her own again and we decided at that point, ‘Well, a fourth treatment might not be worth it.’”

Tran didn’t know how to react to the news when he received the phone call.

“At first, it’s the doctor kind of giving you a cheery mood whenever they call you and then they said, ‘Oh, her heart stopped by the way, but she’s doing fine now,’” Tran said.

Though the radiation treatments seem to have worked well, it is difficult to tell how Betty will react long-term.

“We don’t have much information,” Dr. Looper said. “Nobody does radiation on hedgehogs.”

Despite this, the treatment is already considered a success. Most hedgehogs that don’t undergo any treatment and have a similar diag- nosis as Betty are only given four to six weeks to live. Betty was diagnosed with cancer eight months ago.

“Because of the nature of cancer, [the LSU pet clinic] can’t guarantee you, ‘Hey, this will be fine.’ This isn’t a normal procedure they’ve done thousands of times,” Tran said. “But after every time they showed slight uncertainty in it, I was like, ‘Hey, you guys did perfectly.’ The experience with LSU vets has been great.”

The cancer treatments that animals undergo at the pet clinic are like those that humans receive at hospitals. The chemicals used in the chemotherapy are the same in animals and humans. The machine used for radiation therapy was even donated to LSU from a hospital and was used on humans beforehand.

“All the machines are the same and the technologies are the same,” Looper said. “All the chemotherapy drugs we use are developed for humans. We do very extensive testing on them to establish what is the dosage needed in a dog or small mammal, but the chemicals are the same.”

LSU is in the process of creating a comparative research center with the goal of translating cancer treatment for pets and other animals into saving human lives. The comparative research center will combine the vet school, the human health center and physics department and allow those departments to collaborate on cancer research.

“This is not just about animals,” Dr. Looper said. “One health is kind of what we’re going for. We want to develop a one health type of program.”