Case 1 Signalment 12 year-old, castrated male mixed breed dog History Polyuria/polydipsia past few weeks; having accidents in the house. Lives in Alabama. Mainly indoors. Up-to-date on vaccines and heartworm preventive. No travel history Physical examination Obese Laboratory data Complete CBC, profile, urinalysis done. Abnormalities were: Calcium (mEq/L) 11.8 (9.0-11.2); urine specific gravity ...

Fluoroscopy (FS)- or transesophageal echocardiography (TEE)-guided heartworm removal was carried out using flexible alligator forceps to compare the rate of worm removal. As a result, the worm removal rates were similar between the two procedures. However, the TEE-guided procedure does not involve radiation exposure, and facilitates observation of worms in the cardiac chamber and pulmonary arte...

AffectedAnimals: Dogs and cats. Overall, cats are infected by heartworms much less commonly, even in areas in which heavily infected dogs are present. Male cats tend to be infected more commonly and have a larger worm burden than female cats, mostly because male cats spend more time roaming outside and have less resistance to infection than female cats. Cats that spend significant amounts of ti...

A survey on the prevalence of canine heartworm was conducted in 1, 495 dogs from Maranhão Island, State of Maranhão, Northeastern Brazil, from 1991 to 1994, by testing for microfilariae in blood. Of the total, 1,358 (12.8% of which were infected) were dogs with no known history; they included 1,265 homeless animals (10.3% with microfilariae) and 93 kept by owners at the time the survey was cond...

Dirofilaria immitis is a filarial nematode parasite that is currently widely enzootic in dog and coyote (Canis latrans) populations of California. Weak historical evidence suggests that the initial focus of D. immitis in California occurred 3 decades ago in the Sierra Nevada foothills (SNF) and spread to other parts of California thereafter. However, this hypothesis is difficult to evaluate bec...

For more than 20 years, anthelmintics of the macrocyclic lactone (ML) drug class have been widely and effectively used as preventives against the canine heartworm, Dirofilaria immitis. However, in recent years an increased number of lack of efficacy (LOE) cases are being reported, in which dogs develop mature heartworm infections despite receiving monthly prophylactic doses of ML drugs. While t...

Dirofilaria immitis is the causative agent of heartworm disease. Reports of macrocyclic lactone inefficacy prompted an investigation of genetic polymorphism in D. immitis. Currently, there is a lack of genetic information for this parasite. Information on baseline levels of genetic heterogeneity in the dog heartworm would have important implications for the possible development of macrocyclic l...

The present study was performed to investigate the seroprevalence and risk factors for Dirofilaria immitis infection in cats from Liaoning province, northeastern China. From October 2014 to September 2016, sera of 651 cats, including 364 domestic cats and 287 feral cats (332 females and 319 males) were assessed. They were tested for the presence of D. immitis antigen using SNAP Heartworm RT tes...

The present study aimed to examine two glomerular markers (urinary albumin, uALB; urinary C-reactive protein, uCRP) in healthy dogs and in dogs infected with Dirofilaria immitis, and to identify some possible changes in these markers after therapy with ivermectin and doxycycline. Twenty dogs with D. immitis infection positive by both the Knott method and SNAP 4Dx (IDEXX, USA) test were included...

Infectious diseases pose a significant threat to global biodiversity and may contribute to extinction. As such, establishing baseline disease prevalence in vulnerable species where disease could affect persistence is important to conservation. We assessed potential disease threats to endangered red wolves (Canis rufus) by evaluating regional (southeastern United States) disease occurrences in m...