calf with heart murmur
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Kingfisher
Well-known member
Hobo":27yzv8nc said:
How pray tell would you even know that........................?
i had one that was weaned when we discovered it. never had another one . he would walk up to eat and then just lay down before eating, i thought it was respritory, the next couple of days he couldn't make it all the way up. so i took him to the vet and he was having congestive heart problems. the vet said as they get bigger it gets more difficult to go on, most just fall over dead and we don't know why.
wbvs58
Well-known member
I don't believe it is hereditory, usually a development defect. A heart murmer is produced by abnormal blood flow in the heart, it could be a minor valve defect, a defect in a partition of heart or a defect in blood vessels. Some can disappear as they get older, some can be major, some can be of no obvious significance. I worked with a girl who could hear a heart murmer in every second animal she listened to, most I couldn't hear, most were very healthy.
My advice is to treat it as normal, if it fails to grow and or has obvious lack of reserve then get rid of it, if it appears normal and grows as well as other calves, then do what ever you want to do with it, but don't stress over it.
My advice is to treat it as normal, if it fails to grow and or has obvious lack of reserve then get rid of it, if it appears normal and grows as well as other calves, then do what ever you want to do with it, but don't stress over it.
Lucky_P
Well-known member
Not a heritable trait - just an 'accident' during fetal development. Not really anything that you can do - at least not in an economically feasible manner. If it were a human baby, you'd probably spend hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to fix it.
I see lots of congenital cardiac anomalies at necropsy - most are interventricular septal defects - a hole between right and left ventricles of the heart - would cause a heck of a murmur if you got to listen to it - but most just turn up dead with no abnormal clinical signs noted. Next most common abnormality that I see is anomalous transposition of the left coronary artery to the pulmonic trunk - but that wouldn't cause a murmur, just cardiac failure, as the left ventricle would be supplied with low oxygen and lower blood pressure.
See an occasional patent ductus arteriosis or other cardiovascular anomalies, like Tetralogy of Fallot, but IVS and ALCAPA comprise the majority I've seen over the past 20+ years.
Had a calf born in my own herd a couple of years back that I thought had pneumonia, about 7-10 days out from birth - treated it with Baytril, and it seemed to get better(I was imagining it!) for a couple of days, but then crashed and burned. When I performed a necropsy, I found that it essentially had only one ventricle(the left), so oxygenated & deoxygenated blood were constantly mixing and being pumped through both the pulmonary and systemic circulatory systems, as both the aorta and pulmonic trunk originated from that one ventricle.
I see lots of congenital cardiac anomalies at necropsy - most are interventricular septal defects - a hole between right and left ventricles of the heart - would cause a heck of a murmur if you got to listen to it - but most just turn up dead with no abnormal clinical signs noted. Next most common abnormality that I see is anomalous transposition of the left coronary artery to the pulmonic trunk - but that wouldn't cause a murmur, just cardiac failure, as the left ventricle would be supplied with low oxygen and lower blood pressure.
See an occasional patent ductus arteriosis or other cardiovascular anomalies, like Tetralogy of Fallot, but IVS and ALCAPA comprise the majority I've seen over the past 20+ years.
Had a calf born in my own herd a couple of years back that I thought had pneumonia, about 7-10 days out from birth - treated it with Baytril, and it seemed to get better(I was imagining it!) for a couple of days, but then crashed and burned. When I performed a necropsy, I found that it essentially had only one ventricle(the left), so oxygenated & deoxygenated blood were constantly mixing and being pumped through both the pulmonary and systemic circulatory systems, as both the aorta and pulmonic trunk originated from that one ventricle.
I bought a calf a while back that acted the same way. Treated it with Nuflor and it got better for a couple of days then acted like pnemonia again. Treated again, same results. Did that 4 or 5 times and finally one day when the vet was by had him look at the calf. He listened to the heart and said it had a hole in it. I shout the little bugger and cut him open and sure enough there was a gap between the 2 sides of the heart. That's the best way I can describe what it looked like.Lucky_P":367vglyw said:
Ah, yes.....brings back some fond memories. I remember when I was a kid.....going out through the herd with Grandpa, roping calves and checking their heartbeats with a stethoscope. Those were the days.Hobo":1lpwziv7 said:
(sorry, just couldn't help a little sarchasm there, please don't take it too seriously)
