As pets get older, the approach to care veterinarians take to ensure quality of life needs to adapt. This idea is becoming increasingly important with senior pets continuing to represent larger portions of the patients veterinarians see. Today, senior dogs and cats account for 44% of the pet population.¹

One major priority for this demographic is heart health. Older pets are more likely to experience heart disease – myxomatous mitral valve degeneration (MMVD) in dogs and hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) in cats. These conditions can rapidly decrease quality of life and lead to heart failure.

In early 2023, the American Animal Hospital Association (AAHA) published guidelines¹ for the care of senior pets. Among several other accommodations to enhance care, AAHA includes annual testing of cardiac biomarker NT-proBNP, which can indicate both MMVD and HCM, as well as encouraging veterinarians to strongly consider NT-proBNP testing before an anesthetic event.

NT-proBNP is a natriuretic peptide released during atrial stretching with the biological goal of returning the heart to a normal state. Due to NT-proBNP’s role in managing heart health, testing its levels in the patient’s system has proven to be a stable and reliable indicator of heart disease presence and severity.

In many cases, testing for NT-proBNP levels has led to heart disease diagnoses that predated clear clinical signs of the condition. Dogs often present with a murmur consistent with the degree of cardiac damage, but that is not always the case. Sometimes a dog may exhibit no murmur while experiencing severe MMVD, or conversely have a strong murmur and no cardiac distress. Cats are even more difficult to diagnose based on symptoms alone, with unpredictable correlation between murmurs and HCM. Regardless of the difficulty unpacking clinical signs, early detection is crucial to effective treatment options for both species, and the recommended annual testing gives veterinarians a comprehensive idea of what’s going on inside the animal before they make those decisions.

Along with annual monitoring, AAHA’s recommended testing before an anesthetic event allows veterinarians to build the most accurate anesthetic treatment plan. Heart disease in both dogs and cats greatly increases the chance of anesthetic death, and veterinarians who know the status of this risk factor can administer anesthesia according to the results and with an increased confidence that the patient will not be negatively impacted.

For both annual and pre-anesthetic testing, test results should indicate NT-proBNP levels as close to the treatment planning time as possible. This can be difficult with a reference lab, as veterinarians often wait several hours to several days for results. Quantitative, in-clinic testing has recently become available with the Bionote Vcheck canine and feline NT-proBNP tests on the Vcheck V200 analyzer, with these tests, numeric results are provided in 15 minutes for rapid decision making when patients need it most.

Dogs and cats in their later years may not act the same way as when they were young, but they are just as deserving of high care standards and good quality of life. AAHA’s new guidelines give a comprehensive breakdown of ways to accommodate senior pets and their changing health conditions, including NT-proBNP testing for the best cardiac care and healthy, happy hearts.

More information about NT-proBNP testing and options available to bring quantitative testing to your clinic are available here: https://www.bionote.com/events.

This content authored and sponsored by Bionote.

References

1. 2023 AAHA Senior Care Guidelines for Dogs and Cats. https://www.aaha.org/aaha-guidelines/2023-aaha-senior-care-guidelines-for-dogs-and-cats/home/. Accessed online May 9, 2023.