Your vet will guide you on the best course of action for treating your dog depending on the severity of their infection. Dogs can live for at least six to seven months after becoming infected with heartworms. This is because it takes that long for adult heartworms to grow.
Dogs with heartworm disease can live high-quality lives as long as they are given appropriate care. After completing treatment and following your veterinarian's recommenda- tions on heartworm disease testing and prevention, the chances of any long-term effects are very low.
Dogs with no signs or mild signs of heartworm disease, such as cough or exercise intolerance, have a high success rate with treatment. More severe disease can also be successfully treated, but the possibility of complications is greater.
No one wants to hear that their dog has heartworm, but the good news is that most infected dogs can be successfully treated. The goal is to first stabilize your dog if he is showing signs of disease, then kill all adult and immature worms while keeping the side effects of treatment to a minimum.
In the past, the drug used to treat heartworm disease contained high levels of arsenic, and toxic side effects frequently occurred. A newer drug is available that does not have as many side effects, allowing successful treatment of more than 95% of dogs with heartworms.
The lifespan of a dog in this condition is most likely limited to a few weeks or a few months. Your vet will guide you on the best course of action for treating your dog depending on the severity of their infection. Dogs can live for at least six to seven months after becoming infected with heartworms.
All of the damage that the heartworms do while they're inside the body is permanent. Sometimes we can reverse some of the symptoms, but all of the damage will still be present.
It's hard to say in pets whether it is painful. I don't think the worm as it travels itself is necessarily painful, but as they develop these symptoms, discomfort and pain follows. The inflammation that the worm causes can lead to pain as well inside the body.
In a way, yes. Your dog can feel the discomfort that goes hand-in-hand with the heartworms hatching from larvae stages into adulthood. They can also feel them migrating from one spot to another inside their body, specifically if they're affecting your dog's lungs and breathing.
In severely affected dogs, you may see a swollen abdomen due to fluid buildup because the heart cannot effectively circulate blood, or notice a cough, or other signs such as respiratory distress. Heartworm disease in dogs is known as a silent killer, because it can take months before your dog shows symptoms.
Keeping Your Heartworm Positive Dog Happy
During exercise restriction: Give several; short leash walks during the off-temperature times of the day. These are SHORT walks, 10 minutes max at a leisurely pace. Provide more exploration and sniffing activities than actual walking.
The American Animal Hospital Association places the average cost of preventative heartworm treatment for dogs at $5-$15 per month and the cost of treating a dog already diagnosed with heartworm at $400-$1,000. With both prevention and treatment, costs typically increase with the weight of the dog.
The trauma caused by even a small number of heartworms can lead to rapid and often permanent change within the pulmonary arteries.
Although there are fewer mosquitoes in the winter, there is still a risk that your pet could get heartworms if you stop giving heartworm prevention medication during this season. That's one reason veterinarians strongly recommend pets receive heartworm prevention medication year-round.
Class 4 Heartworm Infection
A class four heartworm infection is also often referred to as caval syndrome in dogs. This stage is characterized by complete organ failure, and sadly most dogs with a stage four heartworm infection will end up passing away.
The adult worms die in a few days and start to decompose. As they break up, they are carried to the lungs, where they lodge in the small blood vessels and are eventually reabsorbed by the body.
The medicine in the treatment (Immiticide) can cause a lot of inflammation at the injection site. This can occur no matter how smoothly things go and how little it seems to bother the dog at the time. This can range from being absolutely undetectable to a dog that is crying constantly with pain.
Heartworms can also cause nosebleeds, pneumonia, high blood pressure, seizures, blindness, and excessive sleeping. When heartworms reach places other than the heart and lungs, like the brain and eyes, dogs will experience seizures and blindness.
When your dog's heartworm blood test comes back positive, your veterinarian will run a few other tests. These tests will determine the stage and severity of your pet's illness in order to come up with the correct treatment plan. Some of these important tests include: Urinalysis.
In those cases where we have an appropriate patient and an owner who's willing and able to go ahead and do the full treatment, then we use a drug called Melarsomine. That is the actual adulticide treatment for heartworm disease.
Not all dogs with heartworm disease develop into stage 4. But if it is left untreated, heartworm disease will progress and damage the dog's heart, lungs, liver, and kidneys, eventually causing death.
Caution: Get professional help for this treatment. Heartworm disease is dangerous and isn't something to treat by yourself. You can treat your dog at home, but make sure you get help from a holistic vet or herbalist.
With time, dogs that are not killed by infections will eventually test negative due to the natural death of the parasites. Without treating a large number of heartworm positive dogs with natural therapies, then proving they show a negative result on a heartworm test, it's impossible to recommend a natural therapy.
Recheck Heartworm Test: After the Immiticide is administered it takes about 4-6 months for the heartworms to die off. 6 months after the 2nd & 3rd treatments we retest for heartworms to make they were all terminated. Continuous heartworm prevention is highly recommended to insure the patient will test negative.