Heart Murmurs in Dogs

Hey, guys. Dr. Lara here. Today I am here with Phoebe. Phoebe is a Boston terrier puppy, and she is coming in. She's here because. Or the topic of the video is heart murmurs. Now, Phoebe has a heart murmur. And when I first, you know, it wasn't something that was obvious or that I heard when I first did my exam on her. And then later on when I was doing another exam on her, I always do the same exam, nose to tail, every single time I heard a heart murmur. And so the topic of, like I said, is about heart murmurs. Today, Bert, the. You know, some patients can actually go ahead. I'm going to hand off beanie to Bert. There we go. Thank you. Some patients can live a very long life and a normal life with heart murmurs. My son has a heart murmur, and the cardiologist says it's normal. But that was after we went ahead and did an ultrasound on his heart. And so, you know, there are different tests that can be done to help evaluate heart murmurs to see if there is evidence of disease. And so whenever we have a murmur, I'm going to come over here. Murmurs. Typically, what happens is you'll go ahead and you'll have the heart, the blood flowing in through here, it'll go through there. And so these parts right here, these are valves. And so what'll happen sometimes is, is as the blood is flowing through here, you can see one set of valves will be closed, and then the other set of valves will be open. So what happens is when the heart contracts, all the blood goes in one direction, versus if one valve is open over here a little bit and the valves are open over here, you're going to have a little bit of backflow in a direction that you don't want. And so typically when we have heart murmersi, a normal heart sounds go something like this. Lub dub, lub dub, lub dub. Versus when we have a heart murmur, what we will typically hear is we might hear something like lub, lub, or we might hear. So depending on the sound, those could give the veterinarian some indications as to what may be going on, but they will not be able to give you an exact diagnosis of what anatomically is going on with your dog. They might be able to give you some guess based on the age, the breed, sometimes, and that's pretty much it. So typically, we would end up going ahead. If I do have a heart murmur on one of my patients or if it was my own dog, even with my kid, I went ahead. I'm talking about my two legged kid, because I have four legged kids as well. I recommend going ahead doing blood work, doing some X rays if they're appropriate, and also the most, the piece of information or test that gives us the best amount, best information is what we call an ultrasound of the heart or an echocardiogram. And so the echocardiogram essentially goes ahead and gives us views like this to be able to go ahead and really evaluate the structures of, to see what's going on, how the blood is flowing and all that kind of stuff. Now, we typically, or we don't typically, we always go ahead and work with board certified veterinary cardiologists to go ahead and help us figure out what's going on with our patients and also what are the best treatment options for those particular patients, if they even need treatment and, or then what monitoring needs to be done afterwards to make sure that the patients are safe and healthy and live as long a life as possible possible. Sometimes in a rare occasion, there may be something going on with patients that may be so severe that it does need referral to a cardiologist at a veterinary cardiologist at their own office where they might need a pacemaker or some sort of cardiothoracic surgery. But the majority of times, from a general practitioner standpoint, most of those conditions can be managed via telemedicine if your veterinarian works with a cardiologist, you know, through the Internet, or with whoever it is that's doing the ultrasounds on the heart. That being said, in regards to Phoebe, now, Phoebe has something, what's called a ventricular septal defect. And so when we look at the heart, there are typically four chambers of the heart. And so when we go ahead and look at that, let's see here we have. I want to see valvular. Right. So what ends up happening is we have different chambers and different hearts valves. And so right here is a perfect spot to kind of give you an idea, if we were to simplify it. You have the heart cut into four quadrants and kind of be like that. That's oversimplifying it. The ventricles is there's a left and right ventricle and then there's a right atrium and a left atrium. Okay. And so what ends up happening is the septum is the wall that separates the ventricles of the left side from the right side. And so when we go ahead, right here is a perfect shot of it. So what's happening with Phoebe is that she actually has a very, very small hole in her septum. And so instead of only having the blood flowing through the vasculature, the main major veins and arteries that we want them to sometimes in her case, and she has a little tiny hole, she'll have a little bit of blood flowing through that hole into the other side. Her hole is so small, though, that it actually goes ahead. And the amount of blood that's flowing is very, very minimal as of right now. So the hope is that this will either close on its own. If it hasn't closed by the time she's a year old, the chances of it closing are going to be very, very low. But there is even then, still a possibility that she can live a normal life even with that particular defect in her heart. It was something that we went ahead and, you know, as a veterinarian who goes ahead and offers surgeries and anesthesias at our office, we want to make sure that we know what's going on with our patient's heart. And so that's something that we really like to know. At the end of the day, it is good news for Phoebe. Most likely, I would say, like about 85 to 90%. And she's going to live a long, healthy, happy life. You guys have any questions about murmurs or this particular kind of murmur or defect, leave it in the comment box. If you found this video helpful, please give us a thumbs up. Subscribe and if you know somebody who needs to watch it, please share it with them. Keep yourself safe and take care.