My name is Sam Meisler and I am a small animal veterinarian. Let’s talk about dog coughing. Coughing can be a symptom of a lot of different diseases but let’s touch upon the common ones.
The most common ones seems to be that syndrome called kennel cough. Kennel cough is caused by a variety of organisms, some bacteria, some viruses, all collected together for the kennel cough complex. Usually causes up a respiratory symptoms that can progress to a pneumonia. So, when you have kennel cough, you need to be careful. Usually kennel cough comes from an area where dogs have met other dogs that have the disease like a shelter, can be even in a veterinary hospital, when they go into boarding at the park, all these places, any place where there’s a lot dog traffic. You’ll actually see kennel cough.
There is a vaccine for some of the organisms that cause it and I would highly recommend getting your pet vaccinated for kennel cough.
Other diseases that cause coughing; big one is heartworm disease, coughing is one of the symptoms of heartworm disease. Somehow on dogs may not have coughing as the symptom but if your dog was coughing, that’s one of the things we’re going to want to test for.
Coughing can of course be caused by other disease like pneumonia, caused by a variety of mechanisms, fungal disease can cause pneumonia, bacteria can cause pneumonia so pneumonia or a bronchopneumonia will actually be more clear, a disease of the airways causing the pneumonia will be a possible cause of coughing.
The other disease I want to talk about as far as coughing because we see this a lot in older dogs is congestive heart failure. When the heart for whatever reason is not pumping the blood efficiently and most of the time this is from the valves in the heart degenerating and the heart not able to pump blood efficiently to the body into the lungs, you will get congestion behind the heart, from the blood that is flowing to the heart form the lungs from the blood that is flowing to the heart from the body; there will be congestion. And as the heart beats more inefficiently, you can get this slurred breath up which can cause coughing, coughing can also be caused by the heart muscle itself expanding as the heart becomes more inefficient, it actually tries to pump harder to make up for it and this can cause an enlargement of the heart, sometimes pushing up on the windpipe and it causes almost like a tickling sensation like causes a cough.
Anyway, that gives you some idea of some basic causes of coughing, some of the more common ones, obviously we have not touched on all of them but it gives you an idea as to what we’re looking at.
When we walk up about with coughing, obviously going back to the original causes, we’re going to do a good physical exam, we’re going to do a heartworm test, we’re going to want to do chest x-rays and some blood work as a minimum data base.
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