Part of any surgical procedure involves a pre-anesthetic veterinary appointment. We’ll do a nose-to-tail exam, checking for any other signs of disease or heart murmurs that would affect the anesthetic or surgical recommendations. We also check to see that a male dog has two testicles, and we look for signs of mammary tumors in a female dog. We'll also do some screening blood work to check for underlying kidney or liver problems and clotting diseases. We can now offer an ECG or EKG to screen for heart disease, which is a lot more common than we previously realized.

A spay is for a female dog, and a neuter is for a male dog. In a spay, we remove the ovaries and sometimes part of the uterus. In a castrate or neuter, we remove the dog's testicles.

If we don't prevent heartworm, the chronic lung disease in cats will eventually become resistant to treatment and become fatal. Sometimes that's the only sign that you see is death. The cat has adult heartworm, and it doesn't show any symptoms, and then the owner finds the pet deceased. That, unfortunately, is the first sign that you see with a cat.

Asthma in and of itself as an allergic problem is widespread in cats, also making it tough to diagnose heartworm in cats.

As an aside, we recommend yearly retroviral screening, which are diseases like feline leukemia and FIV, which are for a different day of discussion. But that particular test also tests for heartworm disease as well. We recommend outdoor cats get screened for those diseases, so we're inadvertently screening for heartworm as well. It helps with preparedness for what might happen in the life of that cat if it is positive.

For the most part, these preventives are very well tolerated. Sometimes you’ll see local site reactions where you apply the topical; they'll lose hair and get itchy. On occasion, I've had owners report cats that just don't feel well after the topical is applied. If we suspect that the heartworm preventative is causing some lethargy or depression, we'll switch products.

Yeah, it’s challenging in cats. Cats often test negative for everything, but they're infected with heartworm because it does different things in a cat. If a cat has asthma-like symptoms, and cats get asthma anyway, it's an allergic lung disease, but it can also be triggered by heartworm. It's often an educated guess. The treatment is the same as treating asthma, with steroids, bronchodilators, things like that, but we’re still going to have to figure out if heartworm is the underlying cause. If we suspect heartworm, we may do antigen testing later to see if it was heartworm that caused the asthma attack, and we may never know.

The incidence in cats is much lower than a dogs because it is a dog parasite for the most part. Cats’ lifestyles and things like that make them a little less susceptible as well. But it's the cat's immune system reaction to the parasite when they get infected that causes all the cat symptoms more than anything.