RESEARCH COMMUNICATIONS OF THE 28th ECVIM-CA CONGRESS

Diagnostic investigation of an heart murmur or dyspnea in dogs requires diagnostic imaging procedures, thoracic radiographic examination (TRE) or cardiac ultrasound (CUS). Those procedures represent a high cumulative cost. In asymptomatic dogs with mitral valve disease, dogs with cardiac enlargement require CUS and sometimes treatments, whereas dogs without cardiac enlargement do not. Dogs with dyspnea of cardiac origins will benefit from CUS whereas in dogs with “non‐cardiac” dyspnea, TRE will be more informative. The use of cardiac biomarkers for patient stratification is a proposed option for accelerating diagnostic process and limiting diagnostic procedures costs. Cardiac troponin I (cTnI) is a biomarker of myocardial damage and can be used for diagnostic and prognostic purposes. The main limitation of cTnI in veterinary cardiology is the lack of bedside analyzer and the high lower detection limit of some analyzer. The aim of this study was to evaluate the interest of a highly sensitive cTnI bedside analyzer to categorize patient in a prospectively recruited population of dogs with mitral insufficiency and/or dyspnea.