Prognosis in canine mammary malignant tumours

Mammary gland neoplasms are second in importance after skin tumours regarding their frequency of appearance. They are still mainly treated using surgery. However, when the change is malignant the disease process often returns to the scar site where metastases develops into the local lymph nodes and remote intrinsic organs, ultimately causing the animal's death. The high rate of recurrence and postoperative metases have encouraged the search for additional ways of treating animals and for selection methods which could ensure that they benefit from early chemotherapy or other therapeutic methods. Determining prognostic factors in canine mammary tumours, which would allow further prognosis of the course of the disease, as well as selecting the most favourable treatment method has been the subject of numerous studies and is still of ongoing interest for veterinary oncology. The work reviews the literature on the prognostic value of clinical and histopatological classification of mammary gland neoplasms, indicators of proliferate activity of tumour cells, DNA content in neoplasm cell nucleus and oncogenes expression.