Cardiology

Most cardiac disease in dogs and cats is found by a general practitioner with a stethoscope, long before a cardiologist is involved. The questions that follow are practical ones. Does this murmur need imaging now or at the next annual visit? Is this dog at the stage where published trial evidence supports starting treatment before heart failure? Is this cat's gallop sound a reason to delay anesthesia? This hub is organized around those decisions.

The backbone of the canine material is the ACVIM consensus statement on myxomatous mitral valve disease, which sorts dogs into stages A through D: at risk, structural disease without signs (split into B1 and B2 by the degree of cardiac enlargement), current or past heart failure, and failure that is refractory to standard treatment. That staging has become the shared language of referral letters and trial enrollment, so we give it its own guide and then a second guide on the disease itself. The feline material rests on the ACVIM consensus statement on the classification, diagnosis, and management of cardiomyopathies in cats, which uses a parallel staging scheme. The hypertension guide follows the ACVIM consensus statement on systemic hypertension, including its categories of target-organ-damage risk and its insistence on a standardized measurement protocol.

Each guide states which recommendations the consensus panels reached with agreement and which they flagged as lacking evidence, because that distinction matters in a field where a small number of trials carry a great deal of weight. Where the guides describe diagnostic criteria, such as the echocardiographic and radiographic measurements used to define stage B2, they quote the consensus statement's own thresholds and attribute them. Doses appear only where a cited source gives them.

Cardiology in general practice is also a team activity. Sleeping respiratory rate counted at home by the client is one of the most useful monitoring tools the literature describes, and it is usually a technician who teaches it. Blood pressure measurement technique determines whether the number means anything. Recheck intervals for renal values and electrolytes after a medication change are a scheduling problem as much as a medical one. The guides call out those operational pieces separately so the whole team can use the page.