Common heart diseases in cats and dogs

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When it comes to general anesthetics, most can affect the cardiovascular system. During his lecture at the 2024 Fetch Kansas City conference in Kansas City, Missouri, Gianluca Bini, DVM, MRCVS, DACVAA, provided tips and tricks to veterinary professionals to help them make anesthesia for their cardiac patients go as smooth as possible.

In this post conference interview with dvm360, Bini explains to viewers the most commonly heard diseases for dogs and cats, plus how they typically manifest themselves within the patients.

Below is a partial transcript

Gianluca Bini, DVM, MRCVS, DACVAA: So the classic heart diseases in cats and dogs are: in cats, you find your hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. What happens there is there is a thickening, mainly of the left ventricle of the heart. Unfortunately, that leads to the space within the ventricle to be smaller, and so the heart can pump less blood each beat because there isn't enough space to get all that blood in.

On the mitral valve disease side, which is the most common in dogs, actually the most common in smaller dogs, what happens is that...the valve that's between the left ventricle and the left atria—the mitral valve—it's kind of leaking. And so instead of...completely shutting and preventing that blood from going backwards, [it] actually lets some of the blood through.