Researcher: Dehydration Can Lead to Misdiagnosis of Heart Disease

Changes in a horse’s heart size due to dehydration might lead to a misdiagnosis of heart disease based on echocardiogram, according to researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s New Bolton Center.
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Changes in a horse’s heart size due to dehydration might lead to a misdiagnosis of heart disease based on echocardiogram, according to researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s New Bolton Center who recently completed a study on the subject. They also uncovered another potential use for echocardiograms in the process.

“The size of the heart changes in other species when they are dehydrated, so we wanted to see whether similar changes occurred in horses,” said Claire Underwood, MA, VetMB, MRCVS, a fellow in ultrasonography in Penn’s department of clinical sciences , in Kennett Square, Pa. “Heart size is used to help evaluate cardiac disease. So when a (dehydrated) horse comes in for cardiac evaluation, it is possible to misjudge (the severity of the heart condition) because of the dehydration.”

Underwood and her colleagues set out to examine what changes dehydration can cause in horses’ hearts so they could provide veterinarians accurate information to consider when performing equine echocardiograms. The team found the most significant reductions in size happened in the left ventricle (the chamber of the heart that pumps oxygenated blood throughout the body) and the left atrium (which transports the oxygenated blood from the pulmonary veins into the left ventricle) of dehydrated horses. The thickness of some wall structures within the heart also increased.

Additionally, since Underwood and her team confirmed that dehydration leads to a visibly altered heart size on an echocardiogram, they suggested that echocardiography might prove to be a “noninvasive method of monitoring volume status and response to fluid therapy in hypovolemic horses

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