Heartworm Treatment,: An Owner's Perspective

Did you know that heartworms can cause heart failure in dogs? Or that heartworms are spread by mosquitos and not other dogs? How much do you actually know about heartworms? As someone who works in the veterinary field I know first hand just how dangerous heartworms can be. But what actually happens when your pet is diagnosed with heartworms? Now of course heartworms are spread by mosquitos, so it is absolutely important that pets are on heartworm prevention. Prior to starting your pet on a heartworm prevention your Veterinarian will recommend that your pet be tested for heartworms. There are two super important parts of heartworm prevention. 1 : Keeping your pet on heartworm prevention ALL YEAR ROUND, ALL 12 MONTHS OF THE YEAR!! 2 : Making sure you pet comes back in for another heartworm test again in 6 months after starting prevention or missing any doses throughout the year. Now will you allow me to tell you about my own personal experience with one of my pets and explain why these things are so important?

When I joined the River's Edge team back in 2018 I was unaware of heartworms at all actually. I had never been educated on them at all. With that being said, this also means that none of my pets had ever been on any kind of heartworm prevention. Of course as soon as I learned just how important it is to keep you pets on heartworm prevention, I immediately began bringing in my dogs one at a time to get them tested and started on prevention. My first dog I brought in was my oldest boy, Jasper, he had had been an outdoor dog all his life and never been on any kind of heartworm prevention. Now before starting him on prevention a heartworm test was done to make sure that he wasn't positive at that time. Me being a very worried person I was terrified of what the results of this test would show. The test ran for approximately 10 minutes, in-house at River's Edge, and great news was the test was NEGATIVE! A negative test is always a great thing to hear when discussing heartworms. With the test being negative and Jasper on our ProHeart 6 heartworm prevention (which is a heartworm prevention injection that lasts 6 months) I took Jasper home and lived life.

Now do we remember that the six month heartworm retest I mentioned earlier? As we approached the 5 1/2 month mark after his first test, I noticed that he began to get very fatigued during playtime. This was very abnormal for him, this boy loves fetch! Along with the fatigue he developed a cough, I brought him to work with me to have a doctor check him out. It was decided that Jasper probably had gotten 'kennel cough', so he was put on medicine to help take of it. 2 weeks go by and I bring him back in to have look at him again and to have the 6 month heartworm retest done along with receiving he second ProHeart 6 injection. I was definitely nervous. The 6 month retest is super important due to that if Jasper had been bitten by a mosquito just 1-2 days prior to being tested the first time it would not have turned positive. It takes at least 6 months for the heartworm antigen to turn positive. I'm counting down the minutes as the test runs. As I was watching, the first blue dot appeared, this was the control dot and does mean anything bad, just that you can trust the results of the test. As the timer counted down I watched a second dot appear and then the third. The test finished and as I looked at it it flashed with High Positive for heartworms. Unfortunately, by this time, his heartworm infection was already so bad for him that he was symptomatic with exercise intolerance a cough. That same cough we originally thought was kennel cough, was actually the heartworms causing heart disease.

At this point we get him ready to go through heartworm treatment to get rid of the heartworms. We immediately start him on Doxycycline, which is an antibiotic, to get him ready to start his injectable immiticide to really get rid of the heartworms. After his first injection he had to stay on strict cage rest. That means only getting out for leashed bathroom breaks throughout the day. Cage rest is super important because, when the worms are dying off, they are slowly destroyed by the body. Increased activity can cause an embolus, or clump of worms, to form, blocking the circulation through the lungs. This can cause a stroke or sudden death. So keeping "jumpy puppies" in their kennels is definitely the best medicine. Most dogs will receive an initial injection of immiticide, followed by a 30-day period of rest, and then two more injections that are given 24 hours apart.

After that final injection is given, it's right back to the cage rest. For another 60 days Jasper had to stay in his kennel and only be taken out for short leash walks to go the bathroom. It was hard to see a dog that loved to run and play so much having to be kept in a kennel all day. Once his 60 days were up he got to get back to being a normal dog again. Playing in the yard and stretching those for more than 5-10 minutes at a time. At this point your pet should be Heartworm tested approximately 6 months after the last immiticide injection. This test will determine if your dog's treatment worked. Since I have been at River's Edge, I have never seen this treatment fail. But of course there's always that one pet and it just so happened to be mine. He had gone from a very high positive to a low positive but the heartworms were still present. So I talked with my doctors and we decided to do 1 more immiticide and cage rest for 60 more days to see if it can get us over the hump. Another 6 months passes and it's time to test Jasper again and see if that final injection did the trick... I had such sweaty palms waiting for that test to finish. I was so nervous that the heartworms were never going to go away. That timer kept counting down and I kept just praying that test was negative. Finally the timer went off and I go to look at the results. THE TEST WAS NEGATIVE! This was honestly some of the best news I had ever received in my life. Jasper was finally rid of those awful heartworms. If there was one this I had learned from this whole experience was that I will NEVER go without heartworm prevention on my dogs. They will be on prevention all year round for the rest of their lives. So, I encourage you as a pet parent to call your veterinarian and talk to them about heartworm prevention for your pet, because no pet should ever go without.

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