When we do a dental exam, we're looking for oral pathology. And what is oral pathology? Well, oral pathology is any kind of dental disease, whether it’s inflamed gums, a broken tooth, a foreign body in the mouth, or some type of a mass or tumor, so we’re essentially looking for any kind of dental disease.

Good question. One of the major diseases that cats get is cardiomyopathy or hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, which is enlarged muscles of the heart that don't flex very well. And that makes it hard for the heart to pump blood. And so when that happens, that can be life-threatening for some of our cats.

Good question. So murmurs in cats are not always clinical. Even though we hear a heart murmur in a cat, it doesn't necessarily mean that they have bad heart disease. So it depends on the type of heart disease they have, but many of them can live for many years and have a good quality of life.

An x-ray is a two-dimensional view. It's a big picture, a still image of the chest, and the echocardiogram is a specialized ultrasound of the heart. And so that way, we can look at the inside of the heart to determine the underlying condition of the heart.

Heart murmurs are diagnosed by listening to the heart by a stethoscope.