Thread: Heart Murmur

Hi Eden, I hope your boy is all healed up from his surgery and that he's patched things up with your other kitty. I'm sorry that a heart murmur was detected :( but hopefully I can give you some helpful info and maybe alleviate some of your anxiety.

First off as a vet tech I can say that cat heartbeats are trickier to listen to than dogs. They are faster and quieter and often have more fur muffling them. If the kitty is squirmy or purring that adds to the difficulty. So sometimes what sounds like a mild murmur is just interference. Cat murmurs are sometimes tricky anyway, my old vet was sometimes just not able to hear my boy's confirmed murmur (he has HCM/CHF) even though she knew it was there. Second, as your vet said some young cats have slight murmurs and then grow out of them by the time they are a year and a half old or so. Third there are many causes of murmurs, many animals can have murmurs their whole lives and not be affected by them.

Unfortunately a heart murmur is generally the first symptom in HCM (hypertrophic cardiomyopathy) which the breed is predisposed to :( Even though HCM is the worst case scenario it is not an automatic death sentence. My boy's murmur was detected at his neuter when he was 6 months old and the HCM diagnosis was confirmed when he was about a year old, he had a nearly fatal episode of congestive heart failure when he was about two and he is still here (trying to walk on my laptop at the moment) at seven years old. His condition is very well managed with two inexpensive medications, he hasn't had an episode of CHF in the last five years, and he seems and acts just like any other healthy kitty.

My advice is to be proactive, generally I would say it's okay to be conservative and see if it resolves on it's own but since the breed is prone to HCM and early diagnosis can make a big difference I would suggest getting a cardiac ultrasound (an echocardiogram) Depending on where you live it could either be performed at your regular vet's office or at a specialty vet hospital. You can expect to pay about $300-$400 for it, maybe different if you're in another country.

If you decide to take a more conservative approach I would have the vet listen to his heart every 3-6 months to check for any changes. At home watch for signs like lethargy, exercise intolerance, open mouth breathing, and weakness or paralysis in the back legs (caused by the heart throwing a blood clot) all of them can be indicators of heart trouble. Another good idea is to learn to count his respiration rate and check it weekly. To do it count how many times his belly either rises or falls (just pick one, don't count both) in 15 seconds and multiply it by four. Take your count when he is calm and resting peacefully, if you do it while he is sleeping make sure he isn't in that dreaming paws-twitching chasing imaginary mice stage A normal resting respiration rate for a cat is 15-40 breaths per minute. Tracking it weekly gives you a really nice baseline of what is normal for your cat. For Pikachu I would be concerned if his respiration rates were over 35, he still gets weekly counts and his baseline is 25-30, that has stayed consistent for years.

I sincerely hope I haven't overwhelmed you with information here, it's a topic I'm very passionate about. If you have more questions on the subject, I'd be happy to help if I can. Please keep us informed about how you decide to proceed and how it goes.

Furry cuddles from Robin and Pikachu