Clinical presentations of naturally occurring canine seizures: similarities to human seizures.

The clinical presentations of 119 canine seizures from 41 Standard Poodles and 11 Dalmatians were classified according to a modified version of the International League Against Epilepsy (ILAE) seizure classification system. Standardized use of the ILAE system with dogs not only should facilitate research in veterinary medicine, which has no standard criteria for seizure classification, but also should facilitate comparisons between canine and human seizures. We found that for more than 80% of both breeds, at least some of their seizures had partial onsets. However, because it was common for partial seizures to secondarily generalize, the majority of Poodles (81%) and Dalmatians (91%) experienced at least some generalized seizures. Among partial seizures, complex partial were more frequent than simple partial. For both breeds, two thirds of those with partial onset seizures had exclusively complex partial. Among dogs with primary or secondarily generalized seizures, 80% of both breeds had tonic-clonic seizures.