So after a cluster of 7 seizures (each lasting ≤1 min) on Sunday and an overnight stay at the ICU, Delilah is home and on levetiracetam (Kepra) as a refractory to the phenobarb she's been on for years. Her last seizure was in July (status epilepticus, ~10 min) after which she had her first dose increase in phenobarb.
She's been aggressive towards Alley since arriving home, and the data on LEV causing it is sketchy at best. Apparently it very commonly causes aggressive behavior in pediatric patients with pre-existing psychiatric conditions and is a shot in the dark on whether or not it'll cause aggression in adult patients (which resulted in several people in jail after explosive outbursts).
It's known to be very safe in dogs since they were one of the animals studied for human trials, but LEV has only really reached veterinary medicine in the past few years so there are no solid side-effects known beyond ataxia. I'd imagine if she were going to have a behavioral shift due to the new medication, she would be behaving aggressively towards all members of the household (humans, cats, dog) but who knows.
Aggression is also really, really common after cluster seizures for up to a week. So there's no clear way of knowing if the LEV is causing the aggression or not. The vet is fairly certain that it's from the seizures, so we'll see how she's doing at the end of the week in terms of normal behavior.
Mom doesn't really seem to believe me or want to believe that this is different than her aggression when she went into heat and wants to try walking them together despite hormones and neurons are very different things, and these are very different behaviors that we won't get past through forced, stressful interactions.
Dad is pissed off because he wants there to be a reason she had the cluster beyond just "she has epilepsy" and mad that the vet didn't have solid answers for him. He wants something to blame so she can be 'fixed' because-- almost unfortunately-- we had a good two years without a break-through seizure when she'd first been put on phenobarbital and he wants it to go back to being like that and doesn't feel like 4 months is an acceptable amount of time between seizures despite it being even a little better than the norm.
Anyway idk why I'm posting this, I guess venting. If anyone has experience with a dog on levetiracetam either as monotherapy or in addition to phenobarb can I know how your dog reacted in terms of side-effects and effectiveness?
