Surgical approaches for pulmonary granular cell tumours in horses

Decision‐making without a diagnosis

“…The accompanying article contributes to this growing body of literature describing a horse with soft tissue sarcomas in the head and neck (Pezzanite et al 2016). Along with these articles, many short reviews of the subject matter have been published outlining a particular aspect of the clinical case to contribute to the readers' knowledge such as the differential diagnosis, prognosis and treatment and reviews of accumulated knowledge on that particular neoplasia (Sullins 2015). Many single case reports and the accompanying article on a horse with soft tissue sarcomas also highlight a situation that occurs far too frequently in veterinary medicine when discussions and decisions have to be made without all the information required.…”

“…However, given the difficulty of achieving these studies in veterinary medicine, case studies and retrospective or observational studies also play an important role. When confronted with a horse with suspect equine neoplasia a search of the available literature does not yield any systematic reviews or randomised controlled trials but there are many large and excellent studies on the more common tumours of the head (sinuses in particular) and urogenital system Head and Dixon 1999;Van den Top et al 2008, 2015Dixon et al 2011Dixon et al , 2012. Some papers have proposed adoption of standard diagnostic and treatment protocols as well as grading scales for equine tumours similar to human and small animal medicine but many patients are still treated without consideration of tumour grade (Van den Top et al 2008.…”