ECVIM congress

A couple of weekends ago I was a delegate at ECVIM congress which, this year, was very local – Liverpool! We had some excellent lectures from human and veterinary cardiologists regarding pulmonary hypertension and also Angiostrongylus – very topical as this parasite moves every Northwards.
I was also excited to hear about some developments regarding biomarkers provided by IDEXX laboratories. They have now released a new NTpro-BNP test which does not require a protease inhibitor tube – making it much easier to sample animals in practice. The other really breaking news is that next year they will release a SNAP feline NT-proBNP. This will allow vets to assay this biomarker in-house in dyspnoeic cats – and get an answer straight away.
NTpro-BNP has been shown to improve the confidence and accuracy of practitioners when deciding if cats are suffering from cardiac or non-cardiac dyspnoea – so a SNAP test could be invaluable in these patients which often need treatment ASAP.

Travails of the travelling cardiologist

Today I stopped in at Oakhill Veterinary centre to see the lovely Maddie who was such an angel for her scan. After lunch I headed to the airport with scanner in tow to get to Guernsey for my sister’s wedding. Sadly I forgot about the ultrasound gel safely stowed in the bag so I had to surrender it to Manchester Airport’s finest security guards… Definitely more than 100ml! Not sure they’d ever had to confiscate that before!

Great Dane DCM

I wanted to keep website visitors up to date with the current research we are conducting in to DCM in Great Danes. This is something I am passionate about as I have been involved with the breed for 5 years now. FREE screening is currently being carried out at the University of Liverpool and hopefully around the country in the near future. Get in touch if you have a Dane and find out if you could help in this important research!