This is Derm week kids. Dermatology is a pretty big deal in veterinary medicine. It's common to see animals with all kinds of skin issues related to environmental allergies, flea allergies, food allergies, bacterial infections, yeast infections and, of course, parasites!
What I've gathered from Day 1 of my derm rotation, is that getting a detailed and accurate patient history is imperative in appropriately diagnosing and treating an animal. Things like age of onset, location of skin lesions on the body, seasonality of the issue, how itchy it is (pruritic) and so on. Then, we can do all kinds of cool cytology stuff! Depending on what the issue is, or what we think it is, we'll do different types of sample collection. Some options are skin scrapes, ear swabs, scotch tape preps, biopsy and then your basic squooshing the slide around on a lesion with some yuckiness leaking out of it. Some of those slides, like the scotch tape preps and the squooshy slides are often stained to make identifying various things easier. Once all the slides are prepared, we look at them under the microscope. We're looking for bacteria, yeast, certain types of white blood cells and parasites at various stages of their life cycle. From there, we can decide how to treat the animal.
One of our patients today, who was in for a recheck had been previously diagnosed with Demodecosis (I'll explain in a moment, don't get all huffy about big words just yet) and atopy (or atopic dermatitis). Atopy is basically just a genetic predisposition to allergies from environmental...well, allergens. Demodecosis, on the other hand, is an infestation of Demodex, which is a burrowing mite. Yucky! For these guys, we have to do a deep skin scrape (because of the whole burrowing thing). A deep skin scrape involves scraping the skin with a scalpel blade then kind of squeezing it and scraping again. It's important to get some blood in the sample to ensure that we got deep down in there where the mites hang out. We also did some scotch tape prep slides between the dog's toes and in the inguinal (groin) area where it is common to find yeast and bacteria. A scotch tape prep is pretty much what it sounds like. You take a piece of tape, stick it on the area in question a few times to pick up whatever goodies you can, then put a little stain on the slide and stick the tape to the slide and take a little looksy on the 'ol microscope. Good news for this dog is that we only saw one Demodex on the slide, which is a big improvement over previous visits. We only found a few little yeast buds and some bacteria, but nothing too crazy. Yay!
I'll get into treatments later this week when I have a better sense of what's going on with that. At this point, I can tell you that one of the patients left with two paper bags (lunch bag size) full of medications, medicated shampoos, drops and shots and all kinds of fun stuff!
So far so good, I'm glad to be getting back to some lab type stuff. I missed my old pal, the microscope. Thanks for reading! Only a few more weeks of blog-related fun to be had :(
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