Hi Everyone, I have a question I hope someone can direct me to info about. Shelby is being neutered today and the vet did an examination and detected a heart murmur. II'm pretty sure I read on here or somewhere how SV's can have differing heart rates and palpitations than a normal cat which can sometimes be interpreted as a murmur. This is my vets first time working with an SV. I do have confidence in her and she did read up on SV's in anticipation of working with Shelby. I did pre-warn her about SV's sometimes abnormal (in relation to normal cats) heart beats . Last week when Shelby was at a different vet getting fertility tested, they did an examination and didnt find a murmur or made no mention of it. That pArticular vet does have experience with SV's so maybe that is why he wasnt concerned. Can anyone give me info or point me to some that has a better explanation of SV's in this nature that I may be able to show my Dr. Thanks!
Btw, wish us luck, Shelby's being. Clipped today, I wonder if his meows will get high enough to join the Vienna Boys Choir
My very first Savannah (F2 male) was 18 months old and had been to the vet multiple times before they ever heard a heart murmur...it was low when detected (I cannot remember if 2 or 3) BUT xrays showed he was already in congestive heart failure! He showed absolutely NO symptoms to us, maybe now he was a little lower in energy but he was our first so hard to know if he was crazy for a domestic but not a Savannah or whether in hindsight we are imagining he was a little less crazy...
In any case, we went through some trauma, an initial misdiagnosis by the first "specialist" who diagnosed restrictive cardiomyopathy. I wasn't happy with that vet, she was really arrogant and would only comment via my vet and not directly speak to me, so I looked her up and she was board certified in internal medicine but NOT cardiology specifically. Warning bells so I called up UC Davis (the closest vet school) and they told me what I'd already concluded from my reading, that RCM was very very unlikely and to get him up there asap. They did a lot of testing (it was a full anxious day) to determine he had a defective heart valve (mitral valve dysplasia)... he'd had it from birth and it was causing mitral regurgitation so the blood was backtracking to the lungs all the time, causing the congestion we were seeing on xray. They were great and explained things so clearly.
So my suggestion is to find a good vet cardiologist...you can look up which are board certified in cardiology online.
Savannahs are not any different from a domestic cat, I have never had a cardiologist say they had palpitations or different heart beats... they can have larger hearts but then many are larger cats. I have all my cats seen by a cardiologist now, especially before breeding them... if you are anywhere near LA I would recommend Dr Sarah Miller who is fabulous...she's probably seen more Savannahs than any other vet cardiologist too. She was a resident at UC Davis all those years ago with my Bobo, but now practices in Irvine. She does HCM screening clinics that local cat show clubs organize, hence seeing so many SVs over the years
So she's seen more normal SV hearts too...which I think is a great baseline.
Your vet is right though, some murmurs mean nothing...so you could choose to watch and wait. I'm the paranoid sort though....so I'd want to know. As to not detecting it before, it is easy to miss a low murmur. Vet hospital rooms can be noisy, my vet usually takes my kittens into a back room where it is quietest to listen, he knows how concerned I am about heart health because of Bobo.
The case for finding out now is that if it is something like a valve defect like my Bobo, or HCM (the most common heart disease in cats) then early diagnosis and treatment can make a huge difference. Bobo was not supposed to make it to 2 years of age, with careful monitoring and medication he will celebrate his 12th birthday in May. I've known of many cats with HCM that with good medication and monitoring lived for years with the condition... so early diagnosis is best.
