The Role of Cannabinoids in Veterinary Medicine: Insights from Joseph Wakshlag, DVM

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In this interview, we discuss the potential of cannabinoids in treating common health conditions in pets.

As interest in cannabinoid-based therapies continues to grow, so too does interest in the effects of cannabinoids such as tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabidiol (CBD) on pets such as dogs, cats, and horses.

For insights into veterinary uses for cannabinoids and pets, Madeline Colli, Editor of Cannabis Science and Technology, sat down with Joseph Wakshlag, DVM, PhD, DACVIM (nutrition), DACVSMR, and Chief Medical Officer of ElleVet Sciences. In the interview, Dr. Wakshlag covers a variety of topics including common conditions cannabinoids are used to treat, different effects in different species, legal considerations, current research, and more.

In this sneak peek, we cover common misconceptions of cannabinoids for pets, how cannabinoids affect different breeds, and the endocannabinoid system in pets.

Watch the video clip, read the transcript below, and stay tuned for more on cannabis and veterinarian medicine!

Madeline Colli: What are some common misconceptions pet owners may have on cannabis for pets?

Joseph Wakshlag, DVM: A major misconception is that it's going to make my dog high. Right now in the industry, if you look at some of the products that we looked at in a paper a few years ago, I was pleasantly surprised that most of the product – all the products, actually – were below the lower limits of THC that should be in a product. And that's actually better than what some of the human literature is showing. So I think the companies are doing their due diligence and ensuring that you actually have a certified hemp material. That's a good thing. So it's pretty hard to get a dog “high” from the minor THC that might be in there. I think the industry is doing a good job, and I think people should just not be afraid to try it with the idea that, “Oh, it might get my dog high,” and I think the owners need to know this is not marijuana, this is hemp. So I think if we call it “cannabis,” owners get afraid, right? We should be calling it hemp and ensuring people know that it's not a THC-rich product.

Colli: Yeah,we see that with marijuana, cannabis, hemp. Depending on what you call it, People take a different understanding of it for sure.

Joseph Wakshlag, DVM Right. Absolutely, Yeah.

Colli: My next question is, are different breeds of dogs more reactive to cannabis than others? Have you seen that?

Joseph Wakshlag, DVM: Our number one adverse event, which is really small – it's like, 20 or 30 cases per 10,000 units sold. Number one thing is somnolence. And it always confuses me how the same dose can affect dogs. But even from the pharmacokinetic perspective, we've seen pretty large variations in dogs, and these are beagles. They're all the same breed, and you can see very dramatic differences in that pharmacokinetics of individual dogs.

I joke with some of my colleagues at ElleVet, because, yeah, we try our stuff just to see what it's like, and it's a vet product, but it would not be made any differently than we’ve made, and we've actually done clinical investigations in humans now. So it's the same product, and I'll take it, I'll be like, “I took 10 of those soft gels and, yeah, didn't really make me feel any different.” I felt a little, maybe a little more calm, but, I’m not an anxious person. And I'll have somebody be like, “I took five of them, man, I was just completely chilled out.” That's just the difference in how you and I metabolize our cannabinoids and it's probably the same in dogs. But I will say that there are some interesting things, where I've had a couple of bloodhounds that got a quarter of the normal dose, and they were just somnolent as could be. So we're going to find differences in breeds, and we're just not there yet, and that's where it's interesting for us as a company, because that's what we're trying to do now, is trying to look at breed and dosing, and look at the number of people calling in and saying, “Oh, I've had a problem.” So, maybe I can start picking out that it's whippets, or it's German Shepherds. I think in the next 10 years, we're going to have a better understanding of that.

As far as you know, we'll say different breeds of dogs, same thing's going to probably go for cats, in terms of, we all have domestic shorthairs, but at some point we're going to be like, “Oh, the Siamese is really sensitive to this.” So it'll be interesting as that research and database mining plugs along.

Colli: My last question for you is, what does research tell us about the endocannabinoid system of dogs and/or cats, and is there anything unique about how cannabinoids interact with their ECS?

Joseph Wakshlag, DVM: When you talk about the ECS in dogs, there's been some interesting mapping of it to the brain, and they're showing that the brain stem and the cerebellar areas tend to be very rich in CB1, CB2 receptors. There's nothing in the cat, nothing in the horse, nothing in other species. The dog has really been the preferred one that people have looked at and from a comparative point of view from the nervous system. That’s probably why dogs’ number one clinical sign is they get a little bit unstable on their legs – and that's ataxia – before a lot of other things. People can complain about different feelings, dogs and cats can't really tell you about their feelings, but they can show you that they’re having a problem walking, and that's probably due to the concentration of those receptors.

And as the, I like to call it the “Endocannabinoid dome,” has expanded to things like the TRP receptors – the TRP B's, TRP A’s, TRP M’s, the PPAR, alphas, gammas, GPR, the G protein orphan receptor systems – are now being implicated as interactors and calcium channels as well, and some other channels. I think that that's expanded, and we're now trying to understand in dogs and cats, do dogs who have things like dermatitis have increases in some of these other receptors? It's not just about CB1, CB2, because in dogs we've seen a couple studies come out that itching behavior can be improved when you're on cannabinoids. And so, hey, if we can treat what we call atopic dermatitis, allergic dermatitis, or psoriasis in people, maybe we should be going down that arena. But we have to know if the receptor systems are there. Are they over expressed, and are they potentially targets? And strangely enough, we know more about that in dogs than we know about the endocannabinoid CB1 and CB2 receptor. Because people are now more interested in the minor cannabinoids, they're more interested in all these other receptors and how they're interplaying with the “endocannabinoid system,” which one paper termed the “endocannabinoid dome,” which I always liked better.

I'm just going to add that we're still in the early phase of understanding this. This is a field that's, in essence, about six years old in veterinary medicine. Now, at least on the pain side for dogs, we have six papers that are peer reviewed publications, five of the six showing quite positive responses, and the sixth one saying, “maybe it's positive,” just because they didn't reach statistical significance. And then you just sit back and you say, “I have drugs I use in the veterinary world that I have no data on, I just use it because they use it in the human world.” And so it seems to me that we're sort of at the beginnings of understanding, and that things are looking quite positive for neuronal health type situations like seizures, we're looking at mobility being improved, we're looking at potentially dermatitis is being improved, allergic type diseases. So it's off to a really good start, and I can see it only growing from here. In our case, it would be nice if some of the human world paid attention and said, “hey, wow. These veterinary studies that are being done are of value to help teach maybe the human researchers a little bit about more where they should go.” I looked up things like dermatitis in people, and everybody's talking about salves and creams that they want to rub on people, but they could maybe be taking oral CBD or some other minor cannabinoid products and improving some of these diseases that we see the commercials for all the time on TV.

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