Last year we talked about a temporal relationship between seizures and exercise. It has been shown that seizures rarely occur DURING exercise.

Recently, I was involved in a study, performed at the University of Wisconsin, evaluating increased activity and it's relationship to seizure development. In this study, dogs were tracked using a FitBark(tm) exercise tracker for 3 months and then prescribed a 20% increase in activity over the next 3 months. Seizure frequency and "seizure days' (the number of days that a dog has a seizure) per month were evaluated. Unfortunately, many of the dogs did not actually do the exercise increase as prescribed (ugh!) but even accounting for that, exercise was not associated with a statistically significant reduced seizure frequency or number of seizure days during the study period.

Why didn't this work? There are many possible reasons why prescribed exercise didn't change the seizure frequency. The most obvious reason is that not enough pets made the change to show a statistical difference. The other, more concerning option, is that exercise really doesn't have an effect on overall seizure performance. There are mixed results in the human epilepsy studies. Although it is rare to have seizures during activity, it can happen. Furthermore, some studies showed a lower seizure frequency when exercise was added to a treatment plan and other studies did not.

What is the take home message? Increased activity cannot (yet) be used as an adjunctive treatment for seizure management. It is still a healthy choice, and should be encouraged in all pets but especially our dogs with epilepsy but not, sadly, as a means to seizure control. This was a small study, so my hope is that future studies will yield more robust results.

Thanks for reading! If you want to read the whole study you can find it here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jsap.13568

Have a great week. Happy Thanksgiving! Enjoy exercising with your pets, friends, and family this holiday week!