Here at the lab, we hear this a lot from distraught pet owners when they submit their pets to us for necropsy. It is by far the most common history we get from these owner-submitted cases. We rarely hear this when vets submit companion animals, probably because they've already heard it from the owner and filtered it out for us.
About the only thing these cases really have in common is that the pet died suddenly with no clinical signs of illness.
And that is absolutely devastating to many pet owners.
Sadly, the most common diagnosis (cause of death) in these cases is heartworm in dogs and feline hypertrophic cardiomyopathy in cats.
Heartworm is completely preventable, but monthly parasiticides are expensive. Some owners try to save money by using natural products (don't work) or buying off-brands at the grocery store (don't work). Others aren't aware that they need to give heartworm treatments every month, and in Arkansas, pretty much year-round. They don't know that each treatment kills the microfilaria in the dog's blood that he became infected with in the PREVIOUS month.
It's always a shock to open a dog's heart and see worms spill out.
We also see a lot of caval syndrome, which is advanced heartworm disease. The worms migrate out of the heart into the pulmonary vessels and into the vena cavae. While heartworm disease is more or less treatable, caval syndrome is ultimately fatal.
Dogs can have clinical signs with heartworm disease, such as cough and exercise intolerance, but often there is just acute death with no warning.
Most owners accept this diagnosis with quiet sadness, but we've had a few who absolutely fought us, and insisted that we run many other tests. We've learned the hard way, and ask them to pay for those tests in advance.
Feline hypertrophic cardiomyopathy is a harder diagnosis for owners. It is genetic in some pure breeds but most often our cases are for your Standard Cat, a mixed breed, short- to medium-haired tabby. We've seen some spectacular cases in which there certainly would have been a detectable heart murmur when the cat was alive...but many owners don't get regular preventative vet care for their cats. And cats are notoriously fractious patients in general.
There have been some good studies that demonstrated that a normal adult cat heart should weigh 17 g. We had a memorable case in which the heart weighed 45 g, although weights between 20 and 30 g are more typical. The left ventricular walls thicken so much that there is almost no central space left in that chamber, so the volume of blood that gets pumped out with each contraction gets smaller and smaller. And the heart often becomes stiff and fibrous.
This disease can cause acute death in cats as young as 2 years, which is always a sad finding. There's no good way to prevent it other than not breeding animals that have it. The tests required to diagnose it are quite expensive, and out of reach of the regular pet cat owner.
I've only had one case where the owners thought the dog had been poisoned, and sure enough, it actually had been. But in that case, the dog was found next to a dead (also poisoned) cat, vomitus containing poisoned hot dog pieces near his head, and similar hot dog pieces in his stomach. I ended up testifying in court about this case. It's never a fun day when you get a subpoena at work, but eventually, the neighbor was successfully charged and convicted.
There's really no uplifting message here. People do their best but their pets sometimes still die. Our job is to navigate the path between finding out why and informing the owners in a way that is sensitive to their loss but also helps them make different choices in the future.
No comments:
Post a Comment