So hello and welcome to the Small Animal Clinical podcast, brought to you from the Royal Veterinary College in London.

My name is Shailen Gisani.

Today I'm very pleased to welcome Virginia Louis Fuentes to the podcast.

Virginia is a professor of veterinary cardiology and is part of the cardiology service at the RVC's Queen Mother Hospital for Animals.

So thanks very much for joining me today, Virginia.

Thanks for asking me.

You're welcome.

So Virginia today, I wanted to discuss a topic that I know you have a special interest in,

and that is heart disease in domestic cats.

So I'm not really planning on talking much about the approach to the clinical patient today.

What I'd like to do instead is to kind of discuss heart disease in cats in general terms.

And then I'm hoping that once you've kind of got over today, we can get together again in the future

and focus more on the clinical aspects of patient management. So I hope that sounds okay.

Sure, yeah.

So I guess the most obvious place to start is by asking you,

if you can please tell us about which type of heart disease is more common in cats

and also whether there are any differences in that respect to dogs.

Sure.

Well, cats overwhelmingly get myocardial disease, whether it's primary myocardial

disease or secondary to other conditions like hypothyroidism or hypertension. And although dogs get

myocardial disease, the most common heart disease they get is obviously degenerative valve disease.

And degenerative valve disease is extremely rare in cats.

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