Yes. Dogs can be treated for heartworm, and we stage dogs. There are various stages. There are classes of heartworm disease. The dogs are classed based on the changes to the heart and lungs, X-rays, blood work, and the dog’s symptoms. The class one and two dogs, which are earlier stages, tend to do pretty well. We start the heartworm preventative. We start that antibiotic we had talked about before, and then we allow a couple of months for those things to work. It sounds crazy that we would wait that long, but we also have to wait for immature worms in the body that can not be treated with conventional treatment. They're not susceptible to conventional treatment until they become adults. So, we got to wait for those to mature, and that takes a couple of months. We also need dideoxy cycling time to work to destroy the symbiotic bacteria that live in the heartworm.

And then, that antibiotic is also an anti-inflammatory in the lung, so dogs do so much better if we slowly prepare them for treatment.

About two months later, we give an injection called immiticide or Melarsomine, killing adult heartworms. We give it in the muscle of the back. But not one injection is effective, so we have to give another set of injections a month after that, so heartworm treatment is very drawn out. We have to kill these worms slowly. We can't kill them too quickly because, often, we'll have fatal pulmonary thromboembolus. Dogs do not do very well. They'll have many complications from treatment if we do not treat them slowly and prepare them to be treated.

The ELISA test is very accurate, but on occasion, if it's, say, a really weak positive, we call them, or it's just not a really strong positive, if there's any doubt about this dog's heartworm status, we will take more blood and send it to the lab. And we will do another test to confirm. If we have microfilaria (baby heartworms) circulating in the dog's blood plus a positive test, most of the time, you can be pretty assured that that dog does have adult heartworms.

It's a little bit of blood that we take from your dog, sometimes out of the front leg and other times out of the neck. We mix it with a reagent and put it in this test, and it takes about 10 minutes in our office. Ultimately, it'll give us a positive or a negative.

A dog should be tested once a year. All young dogs should start with testing at six to eight months of age using our current tests, only a test for the adult female worm. And those worms usually take six to eight months to mature, so we can't pick up those infestations until they're adult worms.

Blood clots are the most significant risk of treatment, and some of them can be fatal, which is why we assess our candidates while we're treating them. We do what's called staging to see how severe we feel the infestation is and the worm burden, as the disease is impacted by the number of worms that the dog may have. And it's an educated guess, frankly. We're looking at X-rays to look at changes in the lungs and at blood work to make sure the liver and kidneys aren't having any problems because this is a disease that affects the lungs’ vessels, and hence, perfusion to the organs and things like that. We need to assess all of that stuff, and once we get to that staging, we can make an educated guess as to how severe and advanced this heartworm disease might be and how well or not well a dog might do through treatments.

Death is one of the most significant complications. These dogs can go into respiratory distress syndrome. Also, these worms are 12 inches long. Pieces of them can break off while the dog is running and playing, and they form a blood clot that can go to the lungs or other parts of the body. And sometimes, even often, it's fatal. Fatality is one of the worst complications. Even with treatment, the dog will often develop pulmonary hypertension, which eventually leads to some right-sided heart failure.