Dog Cherry Eye Advice and Treatment Options

Dog cherry eye problems can be a problem for the general eye care of your dog. Cherry eyes occur most commonly in young puppies, most commonly in the dogs with the smoochie faces like bulldogs and shiatsus, but can also occur commonly in cocker spaniels and beagles and poodles and very rarely, but also sometimes in cats.

What is a dog cherry eye?   A cherry eye is a bulging of the gland of the third eyelid.  Unlike humans, dogs and cats have an extra eyelid that pops up from the corners of their eyes and can actually cover the majority of the surface of the eye and underneath this eyelid, there is a gland called the gland of the third eyelid or the lacrimal gland.  This gland produces about forty to fifty percent of the tear fluid that covers—that can lubricate the surface of your dogs and cats’ eyes.  Sometimes, this gland will get inflamed and red and it will actually flip out from the third eyelid and protrude and it’ll look like—that’s why we call it a cherry eye because it will look like a little bit of a cherry in the corner of the eye.

This is something that most definitely needs to be repaired and should be repaired fairly quickly.  You don’t want to let it go on too long.  Sometimes, when you come to see us, we will send you home with an anti-inflammatory type ointment to put in the eye and this is just to help take down some of the inflammation to hopefully help surgery to be more successful, but surgery is always required and there are two different types of surgeries we can perform; neither of which are unfortunately a hundred percent, sometimes it does require that we go back to surgery, but eventually, we will get it fixed.

The most important thing with a surgical procedure is that we do not remove this gland.  You never want to remove the gland of the third eyelid because as I said, it produces forty to fifty percent of the tears and these tears are very necessary to help keep the eye lubricated.  If we remove the gland, we are almost then definitely going to cause something called KCS in our dogs—that is essentially dry eye, and dry eye can cause many additional problems like ulcers and deterioration of the surface of the eye, so we definitely do not want to take this gland out.  We want to fold it back under and make it stay under so that the inflammation goes down and it remains in its proper anatomical location.

So surgery is definitely necessary.  Again, if we leave it out and do not perform surgery, we can also get this dry eye problem that I discussed because the exposure of that gland can actually cause it to deteriorate and stop functioning in its normal way.  So it is very important that you come see us if your dog ends up with this condition and we will help you get it resolved.

If you have any other questions about a dog cherry eye or anything else, please let us know.

Dr. Avery Woodworth

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