Heartworm Treatment for Cats

Video Transcript

"Let's talk about heartworm treatments for cats. Unfortunately there's no real effective treatment for cats with heartworms. In dogs, heartworm disease is very very common, and dogs and cats is both spread by mosquito bites. In dogs they typically can have a large worm burden within their heart and in cats they generally don't. They may have one to two worms, but these worms nevertheless cause a lot of problems. In cats a very big part of the problem with heartworm disease is actually lung involvement. They have pulmonary thromboemboli, which are basically clots that go to the lungs and cause lots of lung necrosis and damage, coughing, weightloss, that sort of thing. So there are no effective drugs that actually treat cats with heartworms. You have to treat their symptoms based on what they're having problems with; such as lung disease. The only effective method is removing the worms, which is a very very invasive type of procedure in cats that's not done a lot in regular day practices. So check with your veterinary clinic first if you're concerned about heartworm disease in your cats. The biggest thing for cats would be prevention. If you have a outdoor cat they are much more susceptible to getting heartworms. Heartgard is a great product that they can take once a month it's a oral chewable and that is a good heartworm prevention in cats. So prevention is the key since there is no effective treatment."