The following is a chart on expectations with and without various treatment options when bone cancer, especially osteosarcoma, is diagnosed.
From the table, you can clearly see why our preference is amputation and single agent Doxorubicin treatment. Amputation alone not only increases your pets life expectancy by about 250% – but far more importantly, this increased time is pain free and happy the very next day following surgery. Pet owners are always amazed at how much happier their pets are immediately after the procedure.
Following amputation, chemotherapy can increase the average life expectancy by another 300%. Again, pain free and with very little chance of side effects. The term average does mean that some individuals may not
get this amount of increased time, but others will actually get a lot more than this amount of time. Hence chemotherapy is well worth considering after amputation.
*Average of information gathered from VIN, Small Animal Oncology by Saunders Elsevier, Withrow & MacEwen’s Small Animal Clinical Oncology 5th
Edition by Elsevier