How to Diagnose Heart Disease in your Cat

Video Transcript

" Hi, this is Dr. Greg McDonald for Expert Village.com, and we are talking about first aid in your cat. One of the things that we do see associated with illness in a cat is heart disease. Cats get a particular kind of heart disease where their heart grows to an abnormal shape and normally a four chambered heart beats slowly like this and injects the blood into the body and everything is working fine. In cardiomyopathy, what we are talking about today, the muscle gets too big, and the chambers get too small, so even though the heart is beating and you are not getting the output for your cat that is necessary. What we finally noticed at home, if owners are really aware, they noticed what is called exercise intolerance. The cat runs a little ways and starts huffing and puffing and has to lie down. One of the things that we see with cardiomyopathy, and this is why we are talking about it during a first aid session, is that they can actually lose the use of their back legs completely if they’ve thrown a clot from their heart because of this heart disease. The clot goes from the heart down to the iliac veins, and that is where the aorta separates into two separate veins to go down their legs, two separate arteries, and there is a saddle thrombus that shows up there and occludes the blood from going into the rear legs. It is very painful for the cat, and the cat all of a sudden can’t use its rear legs. One of the ways to check and see if your cat has this is first they won’t have very much feeling in the back legs and can’t move them very much. If you feel the front leg and the back leg, they will feel cold to you and you can actually even check the pads. This cat has black pads here and so it makes it pretty difficult to see the difference but if your cat has white pads, you will see they are nice and pink on the front and kind of blue or dark colored down the back. Again, because the blood supply is coming down here, and you have no blood going into the rear legs, and so consequently the legs are cold. They also are bluish color if you look at them carefully. If nothing happens over the next 24 hours, you actually get very hardness of the muscles because the muscle tissue is actually dying, and so this is another thing that you really need to have your veterinarian look at your cat as soon as possible. One of the things that your veterinarian will want to do is start some blood thinners. Sometimes they actually go in and do a surgery to take care of the saddle thrombus and remove it, but in any event, your cat is going to need to be treated for the heart disease, which is the primary cause of this."