34 MAY 11-17, 2023 westword.com WESTWORD | REAL ESTATE | RENTALS | HEALTH WELLNESS | SERVICES | EMPLOYMENT | ADULT | MUSIC | CLASSIFIED | FIND MORE MARIJUANA COVERAGE AT WESTWORD.COM/MARIJUANA Post-Op Pets BY CLEO MIRZA Pet parents have turned to CBD products to help their animals deal with issues such as separation anxiety, pain and seizure disorders. These treats, tinctures and topical formulas are now available at most pet stores, but there is relatively little scientifi c research available about how CBD helps or hurts our furry friends. A new study funded by the Morris Ani- mal Foundation is looking to fi ll that gap. The Denver-based foundation is one of the largest nonprofi t animal health research organizations in the world, donating ap- proximately $150 million to fund nearly 3,000 animal studies over the past 75 years. Morris recently funded research looking into CBD’s pain relief potential for dogs that have undergone a common ligament surgery known as a tibial plateau leveling osteotomy (TPLO). To learn more about the research and how pet owners can benefi t from it, we chatted with study leader and University of Saskatchewan professor Dr. Alan Chicoine. Westword: What are you trying to discover with this study? Dr. Alan Chicoine: Our interest was due to a lot of interest in CBD for quite some time in veterinary medicine. Much like in the United States, it wasn’t technically legal for use in Canada in either animals or people, but people were using it. There were a lot of anecdotal reports, both positive and negative, lots of dif- ferent types of products being used, so it was kind of like the Wild West. In Canada in 2018, cannabis usage was legalized for people across the board, but the way that the legislation was written, it excluded veterinary medicine. Technically, it was not legal for veterinarians to prescribe CBD or cannabis derivatives for animals, but it was still being widely used. Because of that, we began receiving questions from veterinarians or clients, like, does this stuff work? Should we use it for this? What kind of dosages should we use? And we had no idea. There’s lots of research going on, but the veterinary aspect was missing. If there’s any benefi t there, what sort of dose regimen would be appropriate? If it doesn’t appear to be working, that’s great, too, because at least we’ve generated that knowledge that people are trying a product that isn’t going to be effective. They’re buying it when they don’t need to, or, more important, might be choosing that over a product that could be more effective for the same purpose. This study is specifi cally looking at TPLO patients. What is a TPLO procedure? The TPLO procedure is a very common procedure for dogs that tear their cranial cruci- ate ligament, which is analogous to our anterior cruciate ligament, or ACL. It’s a really important liga- ment in the knee, so it’s basically the animal ver- sion of an ACL tear. Like people, dogs and cats can tear their cranial cruci- ate ligaments either very suddenly and acutely, like jumping off a deck, or it can be a partial tear that slowly gets worse over time. Depending on the species and size of the animal, the vet may want to do medical manage- ment, which is usually just cage rest and limited activity, slowly letting the joint heal on its own. But for larger dogs, that doesn’t work very well, and a surgical approach is preferred. Basically, a TPLO is cutting part of the tibia bone, which is the big bone underneath the knee joint, and re-angling it a bit so that it replaces the cruciate ligament in stabilizing that joint. Why did you decide to focus on TPLO patients with this study? We know quite a bit about how dogs recover after these surgeries, so we could get a good com- parison of dogs treated with CBD oil versus our negative control, and know what to look for to see if they’re doing better. The most common surgeries, of course, are spays and neuters, but those are pretty simple proce- dures, very routine, and animals recover very well and very quickly from them. We chose the TPLO as a model because there are so many dogs that have cruciate ligament injuries, and it’s sort of the gold standard at our teaching hospital to fi x those. It’s an invasive surgery, and we have really good analgesics that we use already, but it’s a surgery where maybe there’s a little bit of room for improvement in terms of the analgesia and return to function. If CBD oil is going to show a benefi t, we thought this type of surgery might be a candidate where it could actually show a difference. What CBD product are you using in the study? We’re using a formulation that’s an ex- tract in olive oil. The reason we’re using it is this particular product has been used in some other studies. [It] is a consistent product at a 20:1 ratio, so 20 milligrams CBD to one milligram THC. The cannabis provider we chose to partner with for this study provides signifi cant analysis for every batch sent to us; we know exactly what’s going into it, everything is tested, and the stability of the product has been evaluated beforehand. So the product we’re using, if it’s going to work, great, but if it doesn’t, it won’t be because the product wasn’t legit. This is a full-spectrum extract, so there are other cannabinoids in there, too. There may be some benefi t to having THC in the product; it certainly introduces some risks as well, but it is at a very, very low level in this product. We were more interested in the CBD aspect of it, but it’s an open-ended question as to whether or not, if CBD is benefi cial, THC will help with that. We don’t know at this stage, so fi rst we’re trying to see if there’s a benefi t to utilizing any cannabinoid formulation. Are there certain signs of an adverse re- action to the CBD that the researchers are looking out for? We did some preliminary work in 2019 looking at plasma levels of the various can- nabinoids in dogs. What we did fi nd was that with the higher doses we selected, some of those dogs had a little bit of hyperesthesia, or reacting a little bit more to stimuli than they other- wise would. They weren’t clearly intoxicated or anything like that, but there were neurological changes evident that I think most owners would pick up on in their dogs: a delayed reaction to sound, light or movement, and an over-response to normal stimuli. We were using ten milligrams per kilo- gram [of body weight] in that dose group, but we weren’t going to use that for this study. Then we did a two-week safety study in a colony of beagle dogs at the vet college, at two milligrams of CBD per kilogram and fi ve mil- ligrams of CBD per kilo- gram. Some of the dogs in the fi ve-milligram group were a little quieter than the control dogs were, but not anything that owners would say is an adverse effect; no vomiting, diar- rhea or anything like that noted. We also did blood work on those dogs, and there were no major ad- verse effects that we saw. So we felt very confi dent in terms of animal safety. So far, we have not seen any adverse effects reported by the owners. Would you be interested in replicating a similar study in other animal species? Absolutely. I was a mixed-animal practitio- ner, and I certainly have an affi nity for working with cattle. The problem with cannabis work in cattle — and we sort of toyed around with maybe doing that — [is that] the cost is just prohibitive at this stage. Same with horses. Even in some of the larger dogs, the cost is getting pretty high, so with large animal spe- cies, on a practical level it’s not feasible yet. But cats, absolutely. We would look at a surgical model with cats, but the challenge with that is there’s not one particular routine surgery that’s performed commonly in cats other than spays and neuters. They do some cruciate surgeries, but none of them stand out like the TPLO surgery did for dogs. It would be hard to get that sort of data set in cats, just because you’re not doing that many of one consistent surgery. But if this works in dogs, we would love to expand it to some of the other species. Suggest future interview subjects at [email protected]. Ralph the goldendoodle walks on a pressure-sensing pad to assess pain after surgery. DR. AL AN CHICOINE MARIJUANA T O K E O F T H E T O W N
