If your golden retriever has epilepsy, the seizure itself may not be the whole emergency.
A prospective Swedish study of 29 golden retrievers with idiopathic epilepsy and 714 healthy controls put the prevalence at 3.9 percent, and 48.2 percent of the affected dogs had cluster seizures, meaning two or more within 24 hours. Males were more likely to be affected, and so were dogs with gastrointestinal signs. Cereal-free diets also showed up as a risk factor, though the authors treat that as an association rather than a cause. Working and show lines came out about the same.
Researchers from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and the University of Copenhagen published the work in the Journal of Veterinary Internal Medicine. They argue the gut link deserves follow up because it could open new treatment routes. That work is not finished, and the paper says so.
What this means for your dog: clusters are the part that catches owners out. One seizure can usually be watched. Two in a day is an emergency, and the risk climbs the longer it goes untreated. Ask your vet now, while things are calm, for a written plan: what counts as a cluster, which rescue medication to keep at home, how to give it, and which number to call at 2am. Write down each seizure with the date, length and recovery time, since patterns are easier to see on paper than in the middle of a bad night. If you have been weighing CBD for seizures, check what the evidence actually supports before adding it to that plan.