February 2009
We initially invited the dogs on management for long term congestive heart failure to the clinic and gave their carers lots of questions to answer. From this we then designed a short survey and sent it and letters to all the dogs over the age of seven and to Cavalier King Charles Spaniels held on our records.  We sent 685 letters and had 98 dogs visit us and be included in the trial.

As well as identify dogs with undiagnosed heart disease we were trying to get an idea of how many of this ‘at risk’ group of dogs would have heart failure.  Advice was given to individuals where a heart murmur was picked up but no dog was seriously ill with heart disease.  Many dogs had other illness such as arthritis and the most common change associated with age was sleeping more.

Some of the results are displayed below. Only three ‘Cavaliers’ were presented but all had heart murmurs. 28% of crossbreed dogs had heart murmurs which was the next highest. In the last ten days of the study the majority of the dogs with heart murmurs were presented.  We can not explain this.  We only saw 17% of the possible dogs so we could very easily be presenting misleading results.

One in seven dogs had heart disease, based on the presence of a murmur heard with a standard stethoscope