Cat Cardiology - The Importance of Cat Heart Health

Name: Veterinary Services
Brand: Blue Oasis Pet Hospital

Can cats have heart diseases similar to humans?

Yeah, so cats have little hearts just like us and they can actually have some very similar heart diseases as you and I. Cats can have valvular disease so their valves may be a little leaky and cause murmurs. They can have thickness in their hearts that causes their hearts to become hypertrophied which means enlarged and they can also have electrical issues with their hearts which you and I know as arrhythmias. So cats actually can have a very wide variety of cardiac disease.

Dr. Noel Lucas
Blue Oasis Pet Hospital

Why is heart health important in cats?

Well, the heart is the pump and it's, you know, circulating all the blood that we need to keep our little patients alive. So if the heart either is having some leakage, if it's getting thickened, or it's having an arrhythmic beat, those can present as abnormal symptoms in your pet and we're going to talk maybe about some of those symptoms that your pet may have.

How can we prevent heart disease in cats?

So unfortunately, cats naturally have some genetics built into them that predispose them just like you and I to feline or cat heart disease. One of those being hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, which is a genetic disorder of cats' hearts. But we do know that when they eat their food, they actually need to have taurine added to their food because they don't make it on their own, so cats are required to have taurine in their diets.

What are the symptoms of heart disease in cats?

Yeah, so this goes back to those symptoms of heart disease in cats. Cats can have very hidden symptoms of heart disease. So hidden that sometimes a cat with underlying heart disease can have sudden death as its first clinical symptom of disease. So that cannot be overstated that it's important for your cat to come see their veterinarian routinely so that we can look for, listen, and maybe do some screening on their heart because of that known clinical symptom of sudden death in cats with underlying heart disease.

However, if your cat does have heart disease and does show some symptoms of having an abnormal heart, because cats are so sedentary, sometimes it goes unnoticed but just more lethargic or just what we call "just ain't doing right." So being more reclusive, wanting to just like sit around more, maybe having some increased respiratory effort and rate. So just breathing in a different way. Those would be some subtle sort of first signs of heart disease.

Some later symptoms maybe a cat might open their mouth to breathe. So open mouth breathing in a cat is extremely rare but it can indicate some underlying heart disease. Though coughing I guess is on the list, we don't see a lot of cats coming in with coughing that are related to heart disease. It's usually more lung disease, but coughing would be on the list as well.

How do you assess a cat's heart?

So what do we do when we're assessing your cat's heart? Well, number one, we're going to listen with our stethoscope, listen to where their heart sounds. You know, is it beating normally? Are there abnormal beats that we hear? Can we hear their heart valves closing normally or do they have a murmur? So those are some of the things that we listen for just on a normal physical exam.

We also recommend starting usually even at about one year of age in a cat, we actually do some just wellness blood work and on that blood work there's actually a cardiac enzyme that we are measuring now for cats because we know one out of six cats historically have heart disease and even at a very young age, again, genetics plays a role. So young cats can have heart disease. Males are more predisposed than female cats to getting this genetic early age heart disease.

So we actually will draw some blood on your cat, when we send it to the lab, we're actually measuring a cardiac health enzyme to see if your cat's having any abnormal stress or stretch on its heart muscle. So we're looking for those underlying little clinical biomarkers that can help predict if your cat actually is one of those pets that may be predisposed to getting some heart-related disease as they continue to age.

What should I do if I suspect my cat has heart disease?

So cats again are very secretive about their disease processes in general. If you feel that your cat is not doing well for whatever reason, it's really important that you get them in to see your veterinarian so that we can actually just do a good physical exam, maybe some blood work, maybe we're gonna do some chest x-rays.

Heart disease in a cat can progress all the way to where they have some fluid maybe even filling up in their lung or around their lungs and the only symptom that you might know is hey, my cat might be breathing a little differently but they can be in very serious distress and maybe even life-threatening disease. So it's very important that you bring your cat in for your doctor to do a physical exam.

Don't try to self-diagnose heart disease because it is actually incredibly important that we diagnose it correctly and early so that we're able to intervene and hopefully save your cat's life or at least give them a chance to live a little bit longer, healthier life with heart disease.

What happens if a cat has an abnormal cardiac enzyme?

So yeah, if we detect one of those cats that has an abnormal cardiac enzyme, it's called a probian P, then we're able to maybe recommend some additional testing such as chest x-rays or an ultrasound and that's the way we actually truly diagnose the heart disease is with an ultrasound or an echo. And once we have that diagnosis, then we're able to better guide the treatment or prevention.

So do we need a special diet? Is there medication that we might need? We might want to check your cat's blood pressure to see if they have any hypertension related to their heart disease. So we have a lot of tools to diagnose heart disease and we also have some real interventional medicine that we can do to help your cat live a longer, happier life.

If you still have other questions and you'd like to reach out to us, you can call us directly at (615) 975-2583 , or you can email us at [email protected]. But please do reach out, and we'll get back to you as fast as we can. Don't forget to follow us on social media Facebook, Instagram

Cat Cardiology - FAQs 1

Dr. Noel Lucas
Blue Oasis Pet Hospital

What do I need to look for as a first sign of a heart issue in a cat?

Hmm, the first sign may just be, we call it ADR, ain't doing right, just more lethargic, increased respiratory, maybe rate and effort, just maybe positioning themselves in a little different way, where they kind of put their little paws maybe up underneath them, like instead of folding them in, they'll just sit with their little paws underneath their little chest, and just kind of just sit with their neck a little extended. Just something that catches your attention as just, hey something's not right here.

Do I need a board-certified cardiologist to diagnose heart issues in my cat?

Great question, so we do in veterinary medicine have board-certified veterinary cardiologists, and we're super happy to have them. We do not, however, have to have a board-certified cardiologist directly involved to be able to diagnose your cat with heart disease. However, it is a great partnership that we have. Day practices often have the ability through telehealth or telemedicine to be able to partner with a veterinary cardiologist to diagnose your cat. So we do think they're very important to pull into feline heart disease early on, so that we can get the proper diagnosis and treatment started with that partnership.

What does a heart murmur mean in a cat?

Mm-hmm, yep, so a heart murmur simply means that the heart valve is not closing entirely correctly all the way. So you have a heart valve, normally closes tightly, just like a regular valve, but a murmur, there's a little bit of gap in that valve, and that blood is going the opposite way. Instead of just going one direction, there's a little jet of blood that goes the opposite way, and veterinarians, we hear that as turbulent flow in the heart, and that leads us to hear a little sound, and we detect that when we listen to your cat's heart through our stethoscopes.

What does an echocardiogram show that an x-ray doesn't?

So if we detect a heart murmur, we may or may not decide to work that patient up, but oftentimes we will want to get a little bit more information on that cat's heart through maybe a cardiac enzyme called a probian P, or we might recommend doing some chest x-rays or even an ultrasound. The difference between chest x-rays and an echocardiogram, which is an ultrasound of the heart, is when we do an x-ray, we see the lungs and we see our hearts, and we can measure the heart size, but we can't look into the heart to see the valves. We can't see the chamber sizes or the thickness of the muscle; we just can see the overall size of the heart through an x-ray. An ultrasound will actually be able to diagnose the type of heart disease that your cat may have or tell us that we have a nice beautiful normal heart and all the valves are closing normally. But that's the way we truly get our diagnosis, through an ultrasound of the heart called an echocardiogram.

How long can a cat live with heart issues?

So it's a pretty wide variability of lifespan after the diagnosis of heart disease. We do have a subset of cats, unfortunately, usually those younger adult males that get diagnosed with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, which is called HCM for short. Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy means thickness of the heart muscle and the chamber sizes get smaller, and with that disease process, the heart has to work really extra hard to circulate blood. Those cats are more at risk for thromboembolisms, which are blood clots that occur within the heart and then get released into the bloodstream and can cause a catastrophic event to the point of sudden death. That can happen at any time with a hypertrophic cardiomyopathy patient. We try to prevent it through blood thinners and some other things to slow the heart rate down, but the reality is that some of those cats will die very early. That being said, we do have a whole subset of cats with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy that do go on and live a very long life, and ideally, they can actually live into their later senior years. So it's not the best for you to hear that your cat has heart disease or even hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, but with education and regular follow-ups, and we also do repeat ultrasounds on those patients, we can actually follow that heart over time and have some conversation about that heart disease with you. You might be prepared if something is worsening, that we know where that heart is going. But lifespan is really dependent on the severity of the disease.

Can feline heart disease be treated or cured?

Yeah, so hypertrophic cardiomyopathy is one of those non-curative diseases or treatable diseases. We can do some things to help the heart. We can slow that heart rate down with bradycardic medications, usually like atenolol, which most pet owners might have heard of. We can measure blood pressures and maybe use some amlodipine to reduce blood pressure, but we can't really change the way that heart is diseased, so that's not very treatable. We do have a subset of cats that will go into congestive heart failure. Again, we can't turn back the clock on that heart, but we can actually introduce medications to treat it, and then there's some cats that just have some secondary diseases such as hyperthyroidism, that will affect their heart secondarily. If we treat hyperthyroidism, we can actually improve the cardiac health, so that is a secondary disease process that improves with the treatment of another one. So those are a little bit more optimistic if your cat has some secondary cardiac disease related to another disease in the body.

So if you feel like your cat has some heart disease or you have a prior diagnosis and feel like maybe you need some more partnership, we would love to talk to you about your cat and their heart health. If you'd reach out to Blue Oasis Pet Hospital, we'd love to see you. Thanks!