Epilepsy in Dogs: How to Recognize a Seizure and What to Do

In brief

There are five things you should know when your dog has a seizure. First: keep your hands out of his mouth. A dog cannot swallow his tongue—but reaching into his mouth puts you at risk, because during a seizure he can bite down uncontrollably. Second: many epileptic seizures stop on their own within a few minutes. If one lasts longer than five minutes, or several follow in quick succession, it is an emergency. Third, and this is skipped almost everywhere: not every seizure is epilepsy. Poisoning, low blood sugar, organ disease and brain disease can all cause seizures too—and they are treated in completely different ways. Fourth: there is a time window that helps put things in context—with inherited epilepsy, seizures typically begin between six months and six years of age. Fifth: the most valuable diagnostic tool is you, with a video on your phone.

Few things are as frightening as your own dog’s first seizure. This article explains what to do in those minutes, when it really becomes dangerous, why the search for the cause matters so much—and what life with epilepsy realistically looks like.

Note: This article is general information and does not replace an examination by a veterinarian. Every dog should be checked out after a first seizure, even if he seems completely normal afterward.

👉 All about prevention and health: an overview of dog health

1. What to do during a seizure

This comes first because it is the part you need when it actually happens.

Stay calm and look at the clock. Duration is the single most important piece of information—and without checking the time, people routinely overestimate it. What feels like ten minutes is often ninety seconds.

Clear the area. Furniture edges, stairs, hard objects, other dogs. If your dog is lying near a staircase, carefully pull him away by his hind legs—otherwise, don’t touch him.

Dim the lights, turn off any noise, and say little. Stimuli can prolong the seizure.

Watch his position. During a seizure a dog drools heavily, and some vomit. If he is lying awkwardly—on his back or with his neck overextended—secretions can get into his airway. In that case, carefully roll him onto his side on a flat surface and position his head so saliva can drain out of his mouth. This is the one exception to the “don’t touch” rule—and it involves no reaching into the mouth whatsoever.

Film it. That sounds cold, and it is the most valuable thing you can do. Hardly any dog has a seizure right there at the vet’s office, and no description replaces a video—the entire assessment depends on it.

And here is what you should never do:

• Nothing in the mouth. Neither fingers nor objects. The idea that a dog can swallow his tongue is false. What can happen is serious bite injuries.
• Don’t hold him down and don’t try to stop the convulsions. You can’t stop a seizure that way.
• Don’t give him anything by mouth—no water, no glucose solution, no pills. During a seizure the swallowing reflex does not work reliably. Water only comes once your dog is fully awake and standing steadily.
• Don’t wake him or shake him. Your dog is not unconscious in the sense of being asleep.
• Don’t rush him into the car while the seizure is still going—unless it is an emergency by the criteria below.

2. When it’s an emergency

These situations are not a case for watching and waiting:

• A seizure lasts longer than five minutes. Beyond this point, it is considered ongoing seizure activity that often no longer stops on its own. The technical term is status epilepticus.
• Several seizures within 24 hours. The term for this is cluster seizures, or a seizure cluster. If the dog does not fully come around between the seizures, that is also counted as status epilepticus.

You should know both terms, because the emergency clinic will use them on the phone—and because they mark the difference between “come in tomorrow” and “come in right now.”

• The dog does not regain consciousness between two seizures.
• The very first seizure—here it is not a matter of minutes, but it does call for a prompt workup.
• A seizure with suspected poisoning, after heat exposure or after an accident.

Long seizures carry the risk of the body overheating and of damage to nerve cells. That is why the five-minute mark is not arbitrary—it is the point at which treatment steps in.

Dogs with known epilepsy are often prescribed an emergency medication for use at home. For decades the classic option was diazepam given rectally as an enema. Increasingly, midazolam via the nasal mucosa is used today, with an atomizer attached to the syringe.

The difference is bigger than you might expect. In a randomized trial at several clinics, intranasal midazolam stopped the ongoing seizure in 70 percent of cases and rectal diazepam in 20 percent (Charalambous et al. 2017). On top of that comes the practical point: giving a drug into the nose is easier and safer for owners than rectal administration in a convulsing dog.

Why this matters is shown by another figure from the same paper: mortality in status epilepticus is estimated at roughly 25 to just under 39 percent. A review of 124 dogs brought to clinics in status epilepticus makes it more concrete: just under 30 percent of them did not survive the first few days. Of those who could be discharged, a little over a quarter later had another episode of status epilepticus. That is not good news, but it is important news: a dog that has made it through the crisis is not out of the woods—and needs an emergency plan for the next time, not just once it happens again. If you have an emergency medication at home, you should know which one it is and when it is used—if you don’t, bring it up at your next appointment.

👉 When poison might be involved: suspected poisoning in dogs

👉 Seizures after heat exposure: heatstroke in dogs

3. The emergency plan: a sheet of paper on the fridge

The previous section ends by saying that you need an emergency plan. Here is what goes on it—in writing, not in your head. In an emergency, memory doesn’t work, and the person who happens to be at home may not be the one who went to the vet.

3.1 What goes on the sheet

The phone number of your own veterinary practice and, listed separately next to it, the number of the nearest emergency clinic with overnight service—including the address. The distinction matters: after 7 p.m. and on weekends, your own practice is usually not the right number, and that is exactly when it often happens.

The driving time to that clinic. If you know it, you decide faster.

The emergency medication, if you have one: its name, where it is kept in the house, the amount, and the sentence stating when it is given. Not “as needed,” but the specific instruction from the practice treating your dog.

The long-term medication, with active ingredient, dose and times of day. At the clinic, this is the first question.

Known pre-existing conditions and intolerances.

The threshold for driving in: longer than five minutes, or a second seizure before the dog is clear again.

3.2 What to sort out once, ahead of time

Three questions are worth asking at your next routine appointment, long before they become urgent. Do I have an emergency medication, and if not—would one make sense? Exactly how is it given? And which clinic is on call at night?

If you have a medication at home, you should also do a dry run once: packaging opened, attachment fitted, dose drawn up. That takes two minutes and decides whether it works when it counts.

3.3 Who else needs to know

Everyone who looks after the dog on their own—family, dog sitter, boarding kennel, dog trainer. A photo of the sheet on their phone is enough. Add the information that a seizure can happen, what it looks like and what to do.

This is where many people hesitate, because they don’t want their dog to come across as a problem case. In our view, the opposite is right: an informed caregiver reacts calmly, an uninformed one panics—and the panic does the dog more harm than the diagnosis.

4. How a seizure unfolds

A seizure is more than the convulsions themselves, and the phases before and after are often not counted as part of it.

The phase before. Some dogs change hours beforehand: restlessness, clinginess, hiding, drooling. Owners who have been living with it for a long time often recognize this.

The seizure itself. In a generalized seizure, the dog falls over, stiffens, paddles his legs, drools heavily, often loses urine or feces and cannot be reached. Clinically, seizures are usually short—as a rule under two to three minutes. There are also focal seizures, in which only parts of the body are affected: twitching of one side of the face, drooling, lip smacking, odd staring, sudden fly-snapping. These are often not recognized as seizures at all.

The phase after. It is often the longer part and, for owners, the more unsettling one: disorientation, wandering, bumping into furniture, temporary blindness, ravenous hunger or intense thirst, exhaustion. This can last from minutes to hours and is not a second seizure.

4.1 Why focal seizures are so often missed

A generalized seizure is impossible to miss. A focal one is not—and that is exactly why, with some dogs, months go by before anyone makes the connection.

Here only part of the brain is involved, and accordingly only part of the body. Typical presentations are twitching of one side of the face or of an eyelid, rhythmic smacking or chewing with no food in the mouth, heavy drooling, a fixed stare into space, snapping at insects that aren’t there, sudden trembling of one leg, or briefly freezing in the middle of a movement.

Consciousness may be preserved, impaired or absent entirely. So a dog that seems responsive is not automatically free of a seizure.

Two things make the assessment hard. First, several of these presentations look like behavior—fly-snapping is taken for a quirk, staring for daydreaming, smacking for nausea. Second, they often last only seconds and are over before anyone looks.

The distinction rarely succeeds on the basis of a single event; it comes through repetition: a seizure typically unfolds in a similar way every time, starts abruptly, ends abruptly and cannot be interrupted by speaking to the dog. Behavior is more variable and responds to distraction.

In practice, this means: if you notice something brief, recurring and stereotyped in your dog that you can’t place—film it and put it in the diary. Focal seizures can precede generalized ones, and they are relevant for treatment in their own right.

5. Not every seizure is epilepsy

This is the most important step in thinking about the whole topic, and advice articles skip it almost without exception.

First, a note on terms, because—as in everyday speech—both words appear in this article. Seizure (in the everyday sense of a convulsive fit) describes the visible event: the dog falls over and convulses. Epileptic seizure refers to the cause behind it, namely an excessive electrical discharge in the brain. Not every convulsive seizure is an epileptic one, and epilepsy is something else again: the lasting tendency to develop such seizures repeatedly. So a single seizure is not yet epilepsy.

The international task force on veterinary epilepsy distinguishes reactive seizures from epilepsy and classifies epilepsy itself by its cause. For practical purposes, this results in three groups, and treatment differs fundamentally between them.

Reactive seizures arise in a healthy brain that is reacting to a disturbance from outside. Causes include poisoning, low blood sugar, liver or kidney disease, electrolyte imbalances and heatstroke. Here the brain is not diseased—it is reacting. The cause is treated, and then the seizures usually stop.

Structural epilepsy means there is a detectable change in the brain: a tumor, inflammation, a malformation, the aftermath of an accident or of a stroke. This calls for imaging, and treatment depends on the findings.

Idiopathic epilepsy is the diagnosis when none of this is found. The brain looks unremarkable, the blood values are normal—and yet the dog has seizures. Some of these cases are demonstrably or probably genetic. This is the form most people mean when they say “epilepsy,” and when it is treated, treatment is as a rule lifelong.

Why this matters in practice: if a dog with reactive seizures is given antiepileptic drugs long-term, the wrong problem gets treated for years while the liver or kidney disease behind it carries on. Conversely, with a structural cause, time is lost in which something could have been done.

That is why idiopathic epilepsy is never diagnosed on day one. At the same time, it is not only a diagnosis of exclusion: there are positive criteria that point toward it—the typical age of onset, a dog that is neurologically normal between seizures, unremarkable baseline lab results, and at least two unprovoked seizures at least 24 hours apart. These criteria are laid out in detail in section 8.

So the diagnosis rests on both: a fitting pattern and the exclusion of other likely causes. Emphasizing only the exclusion makes it sound as though it is just whatever is left over at the end—in fact, there is a recognizable picture.

6. The time window: six months to six years

Here there is an unusually concrete point of reference that every owner should know.

In idiopathic epilepsy, seizures typically begin at an age between six months and six years. This window is part of the official diagnostic criteria.

From this follows a simple, practically valuable rule: if a dog starts having seizures before six months or after six years of age, idiopathic epilepsy is less likely—and the search for another cause more urgent. In a nine-year-old dog with a first seizure, a brain tumor ranks considerably higher on the list than in a three-year-old.

That doesn’t mean it is never idiopathic outside the window. It means the burden of proof shifts.

For your own assessment, this means: the time window is not a filter but a weight. A four-year-old Border Collie with a first seizure and an unremarkable examination fits the picture of idiopathic epilepsy well. A nine-year-old dog with a first seizure does not—and there, imaging does not come at the end of the diagnostic workup but close to the beginning.

Conversely, an age inside the window rules nothing out. A young dog can have a brain tumor, and a seizure at eight years can be late-onset idiopathic epilepsy. The window shifts probabilities; it doesn’t decide anything.

7. What looks like a seizure but isn’t

Several events are regularly confused with seizures, and telling them apart changes everything.

Fainting (syncope) caused by a heart problem. The dog collapses, is briefly out and is back to normal immediately afterward—with no phase after. Typically during exertion or excitement. This is the most important distinction, because it points in a completely different direction.

Vestibular syndrome. Head tilt, staggering, flickering eye movements, often with nausea. The dog remains conscious throughout.

Paroxysmal dyskinesias. Episodic movement disorders with cramping, during which the dog stays responsive and does not lose consciousness. Known in some breeds and easy to mistake for epilepsy.

Episodes of weakness due to low blood sugar, anemia or circulatory problems.

The decisive questions for telling them apart are therefore: Was the dog responsive? Was there a phase after? How long did it last? What triggered it? A video answers exactly these questions better than any memory.

👉 When fainting might be involved: dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) in dogs

8. What happens at the vet

The diagnostic workup is built in tiers, and in the veterinary literature these tiers have fixed names.

The baseline consists of the history, a general and neurological examination, and blood and urine tests—including liver, kidney and electrolyte values as well as blood glucose. The thyroid is often checked as well, because an underactive thyroid can cause neurological abnormalities and is in any case among the differential diagnoses for a dog whose behavior has changed. Timing matters here: some antiepileptic drugs lower thyroid values, so a measurement taken during ongoing treatment is hard to interpret. That is why it makes sense before treatment starts. If the dog is neurologically normal between seizures, his age falls within the window mentioned above, his lab values are fine, and there have been at least two unprovoked seizures at least 24 hours apart, this points to idiopathic epilepsy—at the first of three confidence levels.

The second tier adds bile acid testing, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the brain and an analysis of the cerebrospinal fluid. Only with these can structural causes really be ruled out.

The third tier would be an EEG recording, which is rarely available in veterinary medicine.

Imaging is recommended in particular when the first seizure occurs before six months or after six years of age, when the dog shows neurological abnormalities between seizures, when there is a prolonged seizure or seizure clusters right at the outset—or when a dog keeps having seizures despite maxed-out medication.

An MRI requires general anesthesia. That is a real undertaking and a real cost, and both should be discussed openly.

👉 What the anesthesia involves: anesthesia in dogs

9. When medication starts

Not every dog that has had a seizure gets medication right away—and that is not hesitation but weighing things up. Antiepileptic drugs are, as a rule, given for life, and they have side effects.

Factors in favor of starting: several seizures in a relatively short period, seizure clusters or a prolonged seizure in the history, a pronounced or very long phase after the seizure, or a known structural cause.

A single, short seizure in an otherwise healthy dog, on the other hand, often leads at first to observation and a seizure diary.

Two expectations need adjusting. The goal is control, not seizure freedom—a considerable share of dogs get significantly better but do not become completely seizure-free. And medication is never stopped or paused on your own: stopping abruptly can trigger severe seizure clusters, even if the dog has been stable for months.

We deliberately do not name doses and drugs here—the choice depends on seizure type, frequency, concurrent conditions and tolerability.

And the decision itself is not one that can be derived from a list. Whether and when to treat is decided by the treating veterinarian based on the type of seizures, their frequency and course, the risk profile, and the situation of the individual animal. The points above describe what carries weight in that decision—they do not replace the weighing.

10. Living with epilepsy

Everyday life changes less than most people fear after the diagnosis.

The seizure diary is the central tool. Date, time, duration, type, the phase after, anything unusual about the day. Only with it can you judge whether a medication is working—your subjective impression misleads you in both directions, because seizures come in waves.

Regularity helps. Fixed times for medication matter more than with almost any other treatment; deviations of more than one to two hours should remain the exception.

Blood tests are part of it, because some drugs put strain on the liver and because blood level measurements guide the dose.

Safety in everyday life: no unsupervised swimming, care on stairs, and when in doubt, a heads-up to the dog sitter or boarding kennel.

Sports, training and walks remain fine. A dog with epilepsy does not need to be wrapped in cotton wool—on the contrary, a structured, calm daily routine with enough sleep does him good. What is worth doing is avoiding extreme excitement and severe overheating.

And one point that often gets lost: the strain on the people is considerable. Nighttime seizures, worry, medication schedules and the fear of the next time wear you down. That is normal and not a sign of oversensitivity.

In our experience, three things bring more relief than the effort they seem to take. First: divide up responsibilities where several people live in the household—one person for the medication times, one for the diary. Shared responsibility without a clear division regularly leads to a dose being missed, because each person assumes the other gave it.

Second: don’t try to stay awake every night. Many seizures happen during sleep and are missed—that is unpleasant, but it is not a failure on your part. If you try to keep watch around the clock, you won’t be able to sustain it and will be exhausted yourself within a few weeks.

Third: treat the next seizure as planned for, not as a catastrophe. A dog with idiopathic epilepsy will in all likelihood have seizures again. A prepared routine—clock, video, emergency sheet—turns an event you are at the mercy of into one where there is something to do. Psychologically, that is the biggest difference.

👉 Why restful sleep matters: Sleep and Learning in Dogs

10.1 Is my dog suffering?

This question comes up in almost every consultation, and it deserves an honest answer rather than a reassuring one.

During a generalized seizure, consciousness is suspended. The dog perceives neither his surroundings nor the seizure itself—this is considered well founded and is consistent with the fact that afterward dogs show no behavior suggesting they remember the event. What is so hard for people to bear, the dog does not experience during this part.

The phase after is the more distressing part. Disorientation, temporary blindness, bumping into furniture, exhaustion—the dog does perceive these, and they can last from minutes to hours. That is exactly why this phase counts when deciding whether to treat, and exactly why it belongs in the diary.

With focal seizures in which consciousness is preserved, the situation is different: here the dog does take in something without being able to control it. How distressing that is cannot be measured.

What you can do during the phase after is little, and still right: darken the room, keep quiet, keep the way clear, stay nearby without crowding him. Comfort in the human sense does not reliably reach him in this phase—calm does.

11. The seizure diary: what goes in it and how to read it

This article names the diary twice as the central tool. Because you will keep it for years, and because the decision about medication depends on it, it is worth setting it up properly once.

11.1 What goes in every entry

Date and time. The time matters more than it seems—many dogs tend to have seizures at night or in the early morning hours, and the pattern only shows up if the time is recorded.

The duration, measured and not estimated. Without looking at the clock, it is routinely overestimated.

The type. Generalized or focal, with or without loss of consciousness, with or without passing feces and urine.

The phase after and how long it lasted. For quality of life it is often more decisive than the seizure itself—and it is one of the criteria for whether to treat.

The day before. Unusual exertion, little sleep, visitors, heat, being in heat, a change of food, a missed or late pill.

A phone video belongs in the diary as long as the seizures have not yet been reliably classified—especially with focal seizures, which can hardly be assessed from a description.

Because more depends on it than on anything else, here are four points for a useful video: the whole dog in the frame, not just the head—whether the limbs are involved is a key distinguishing feature. Sound on, because breathing, vocalizations and your own voice talking to him are recorded too. Keep filming after the seizure, because the phase after is diagnostically informative as well. And don’t delete it, even if it is unpleasant to watch—the video from six months ago becomes the yardstick for comparison later.

11.2 How to evaluate it

The mistake almost everyone makes is looking at the last month. Seizures come in waves: three seizures in two weeks can be followed by four quiet months without anything having changed.

What is meaningful, therefore, is a comparison over longer periods of equal length—seizures per quarter, for example. A medication that seems to work after three weeks may simply have caught a quiet phase; one that seems to fail after three weeks, just the same.

Two numbers are the most useful in practice: seizures per quarter and the number of days with seizures. The second captures seizure clusters that would distort the first—three seizures on one day are something different from three seizures in three months.

And a note on expectations: treatment is considered successful when there is a clear reduction, not seizure freedom. If you only search the diary for zeros, you will overlook an improvement that actually happened.

12. Triggers: what can make seizures more likely

Many owners look for a pattern—rightly so, because some dogs do have one.

Commonly named contributing factors are lack of sleep and exhaustion, intense excitement and spikes of stress, heat, hormonal fluctuations in intact females, abrupt changes in the daily routine and—the most important avoidable point—irregular medication.

It is also striking that in many dogs seizures occur at rest or during sleep, often at night or in the early morning hours. This is not a chance finding but a known pattern—and it explains why owners often miss seizures and only notice from a rumpled bed or traces of saliva that something happened.

What matters here is the context: a trigger is not a cause. Avoiding excitement may lower the frequency—it does not change the underlying disease. And not every dog has a recognizable pattern; if you can’t find one, you have done nothing wrong.

This is exactly what the seizure diary is for: it makes patterns visible that nobody can piece together in their head.

13. Heritability and breeding

In several breeds a hereditary basis has been shown or is probable—these include the Border Collie, Australian Shepherd, Labrador and Golden Retriever, Belgian Shepherd, Beagle, Bernese Mountain Dog and Lagotto Romagnolo, among others. The list is not complete.

For owners, this is relevant above all when buying a puppy: asking about seizures among relatives is legitimate, and a reputable breeder will answer. Affected dogs and their close relatives do not belong in a breeding program.

👉 How to recognize a good source: how to tell a responsible breeder

For owners of a dog that is already affected, a second point follows that is easy to overlook: littermates from the same litter may be affected as well. Informing the breeder is therefore not an accusation, but the only way the information can reach the place where breeding decisions are made.

And conversely: a breeder who receives this feedback and acts on it rather than brushing it off shows, at this point, that they are reputable. This is one of the few points at which breeding quality can be judged after the fact.

14. Limits of the evidence

The criteria cited come from consensus papers by an international task force—that is, from agreed expert opinion based on the available literature, not from randomized trials. They are the best framework available, but they are a framework.

The time window of six months to six years is a statistical rule of thumb, not a boundary: dogs outside it can also have idiopathic epilepsy; it is just less likely.

The impressive difference between intranasal midazolam and rectal diazepam, too, rests on a study of 35 dogs in which the investigators were not blinded. The effect is large and the direction plausible—the sample size is not.

And when it comes to how well the medications work, comparability is limited. Studies use different endpoints, follow-up periods and definitions of success—which is why reported response rates vary considerably.

15. Conclusion

The first seizure is frightening, but the most important things are simple: look at the clock, clear the area, keep your hands out of the mouth, film. At five minutes, or with several seizures in a row, it becomes an emergency. After that begins the part that shapes the next few years—and it is not about getting a medication as quickly as possible, but about finding out why the dog is having seizures. Poisoning, organ disease, brain disease and inherited epilepsy look similar during a seizure and are treated completely differently. And if idiopathic epilepsy is where it ends up: it cannot be cured, but in many dogs it can be controlled well enough that a normal dog’s life remains possible.

👉 What matters when choosing: what makes a good veterinarian

And in case it is happening right now: clock, clear the area, film, keep your hands out of the mouth. Everything else can wait—including the question of why. It will be just as relevant tomorrow, and it can be answered far better with a video than with a memory.

Key takeaways on epilepsy in dogs

Nothing in the mouth. A dog cannot swallow his tongue. If you try, you risk serious bite injuries—during a seizure he can bite down uncontrollably.

Look at the clock. Duration is the single most important piece of information and is routinely overestimated without a clock. What feels like ten minutes is often ninety seconds.

Five minutes is the threshold. Beyond this point, a seizure often no longer stops on its own. The same applies to several seizures between which the dog does not come around.

Not every seizure is epilepsy. Reactive seizures due to poisoning, low blood sugar or organ disease are treated completely differently. Giving antiepileptic drugs long-term in these cases means treating the wrong problem for years.

Idiopathic epilepsy requires a fitting pattern and the exclusion of other causes—it is never diagnosed on day one.

The time window helps put things in context. If seizures begin before six months or after six years of age, imaging is particularly indicated.

There is a clear difference between emergency medications. In a randomized trial, intranasal midazolam stopped the ongoing seizure in 70 percent of cases and rectal diazepam in 20 percent (Charalambous et al., 2017).

The goal is control, not seizure freedom. A considerable share of dogs get significantly better but do not become completely seizure-free—and medication is never stopped on your own.

The video is the most valuable diagnostic tool. Hardly any dog has a seizure right there at the vet’s office, and no description replaces a video—especially with focal seizures.

References

• Berendt, M., Farquhar, R. G., Mandigers, P. J. J., Pakozdy, A., Bhatti, S. F. M., De Risio, L. et al. (2015): International veterinary epilepsy task force consensus report on epilepsy definition, classification and terminology in companion animals. BMC Veterinary Research 11: 182. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12917-015-0461-2 (definition of epilepsy; etiological classification into idiopathic epilepsy, structural epilepsy and unknown cause; seizures as a rule shorter than two to three minutes)
• De Risio, L., Bhatti, S., Muñana, K., Penderis, J., Stein, V. M., Tipold, A. et al. (2015): International veterinary epilepsy task force consensus proposal: diagnostic approach to epilepsy in dogs. BMC Veterinary Research 11: 148. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12917-015-0462-1 (three-tier system of diagnostic confidence; tier I: at least two unprovoked seizures at least 24 hours apart, seizure onset between 6 months and 6 years, unremarkable examination between seizures and unremarkable baseline lab work; recommendation of MRI and cerebrospinal fluid analysis for onset before 6 months or after 6 years, for neurological abnormalities, for seizure clusters at onset or for treatment resistance)
• Charalambous, M., Bhatti, S. F. M., Van Ham, L., Platt, S., Jeffery, N. D., Tipold, A., Siedenburg, J., Volk, H. A., Hasegawa, D., Gallucci, A., Gandini, G., Musteata, M., Ives, E. & Vanhaesebrouck, A. E. (2017): Intranasal Midazolam versus Rectal Diazepam for the Management of Canine Status Epilepticus: A Multicenter Randomized Parallel-Group Clinical Trial. Journal of Veterinary Internal Medicine 31(4): 1149–1158. https://doi.org/10.1111/jvim.14734 (status epilepticus stopped in 70 % of cases with intranasal midazolam versus 20 % with rectal diazepam)

• Charalambous, M., Muñana, K., Patterson, E. E., Platt, S. R. & Volk, H. A. (2024): ACVIM Consensus Statement on the management of status epilepticus and cluster seizures in dogs and cats. Journal of Veterinary Internal Medicine 38(1): 19–40. https://doi.org/10.1111/jvim.16928 (mortality of status epilepticus 25.3–38.5 %, pooled from three studies; status epilepticus defined as seizure activity lasting more than five minutes or several seizures without full recovery in between)
• Fentem, R., de Stefani, A., Gutierrez Quintana, R., Alcoverro, E., Jones, G. M. C., Amengual-Batle, P. & Gonçalves, R. (2022): Risk factors associated with short-term mortality and recurrence of status epilepticus in dogs. Journal of Veterinary Internal Medicine 36(2): 656–662. https://doi.org/10.1111/jvim.16353 (retrospective multicenter study of 124 dogs; short-term mortality 29.8 %; recurrence of status epilepticus in 27 % of discharged dogs; factors associated with death: older age, shorter hospital stay, onset of status before arrival and a potentially fatal underlying disease as the cause)
• Bhatti, S. F. M., De Risio, L., Muñana, K., Penderis, J., Stein, V. M., Tipold, A. et al. (2015): International Veterinary Epilepsy Task Force consensus proposal: medical treatment of canine epilepsy in Europe. BMC Veterinary Research 11: 176. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12917-015-0464-z (criteria for starting treatment and choice of drugs)
• Hülsmeyer, V. I., Fischer, A., Mandigers, P. J. J., De Risio, L., Berendt, M., Rusbridge, C. et al. (2015): International Veterinary Epilepsy Task Force's current understanding of idiopathic epilepsy of genetic or suspected genetic origin in purebred dogs. BMC Veterinary Research 11: 175. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12917-015-0463-0 (breeds with a confirmed or suspected genetic basis)

Frequently asked questions about epilepsy in dogs

What owners ask most often after the first seizure