Fountain Creek Veterinary Clinic Answers Community Questions On Pet Care
 BY:  PATRICIA GRAF CVT/VPM
 
Q. “I have been told different things considering keeping my dog on heartworm prevention.  I was wondering what your opinion is as to whether this medication should be given six months out of the year or year round.” 

A. Dr. Graf and I believe strongly in preventative medicine.  In other words, preventing the disease is much better than your pet contracting the disease and then being treated for it. I’ll give you a brief description of how heartworms affect your pet. Early signs include a cough, especially on exercise and early exhaustion upon exercise. In the most advanced cases where many adult worms have built up in the heart without treatment, signs progress to severe weight loss, fainting, coughing up blood and, finally, congestive heart failure.
Some veterinary clinics will answer your question differently.
 Here, at Fountain Creek Veterinary we have had dogs test positive for heartworm disease that have never left the Fountain area.  Some consider it acceptable to administer heartworm preventive during only certain “warm” months but not during the “cold” months. Then, when the “cold” months are over, a blood sample is taken for a heartworm test. If the patient is heartworm-negative through those cold months, heartworm preventive is begun again.
  This somewhat considered “old practice” began to die out when monthly heartworm preventives became popular. It was simply too easy to give the medicine monthly, and the chance of your dog being bitten by an infective mosquito on a warm winter day simply puts him at risk. Three warm hours on a winter’s day and mosquitoes can be out!  It is less expensive, at most clinics, to continue prevention than to pay for an examination and retest in the spring.
 It is a fact that today heartworm disease is present in much of the nation. Because environmental and climatic factors influence mosquitoes and transmission of heartworm disease, it is becoming increasingly difficult to predict when mosquito season starts and stops; even in areas where seasonal changes appear to be definitive, some risk for off-season transmission can be a factor.
 Year-round administration of a preventive will minimize the risk for disease. In addition, placing dogs on year-round prevention provides the maximum protection when they travel to places with a different transmission time frame. Because of this, many veterinarians, including Dr. Graf, encourage clients to follow a year-round prevention package that provides built-in internal parasite control in addition to heartworm prevention.
  In other words, for less than the cost of the exam and test in the spring, your pet can be maintained on the heartworm preventative and de-wormed monthly. These additional parasites can be picked up from the soil throughout the year. Therefore, it is good medicine to provide a monthly preventative.  Dr. Graf and the staff of FCVC believe that heartworm prevention should be built into a lifelong wellness and prevention program that reduces the risk for gastrointestinal parasite infection. There are so many diseases that we, as pet owners, are unable to prevent, we need to do our best to prevent the diseases we can. Keep your dog on his heartworm preventive year-round, regardless of where you live and help to offer your pet a long happy healthy life.