For those dog owners managing a hound with ventricular premature contractions and possibly supraventricular arrhythmia's who have not had ideal results from the typical drugs of choice and/or whose hounds have suffered side effects from such drugs, then here is a new idea.

The drug Flecainide was put into play in my hounds drug protocol because our board certified cardiologists preferred drug of choice Mexiletine caused swift gastric distress in my hound. Typically, it is tolerated very well by most dogs, however, our veteran bitch had an almost immediate reaction to it. She began vomiting approximately one hour after being dosed and we stopped administering the drug. The second choice of drug that is frequently preferred by board certified cardiologists is Amiodarone. I have been very reluctant to use this drug due to the side effects such as a ALT, a primary liver enzyme usually associated with hepatitis and hepatic carcinoma requiring frequent blood tests to check the liver enzyme levels. Suffice to say, this was not an option for me so we went to an infrequently used drug called Flecainide. After tweaking the dose we decided that this drug alone was not managing her ventricular tachycardia as well as could be expected. Keep in mind that I did not have an option to go back to use the first two drugs of choice so we could only move forward.

My board-certified cardiologist then chose to add a drug that would complement the primary anti-arrhythmic and we added Carvedilol. There had not been much data on these two drugs and how they would perform together, especially not on dogs, so it was going to be a trial. After several weeks, I administered another Holter event monitor, which is a 24-hour ambulatory EKG, and the results were amazing. The reduction of the ventricular premature arrhythmia's was significant. A nearly 100% reduction in arrhythmia's with very few couplets. In fact, she only had one ventricular premature contraction during the 24-hour period. This was, for us, remarkable. Keep this in mind if the typical or preferred drugs of choice are not working as expected on your hounds, and remember, any new medication changes or tweaking of doses should ALWAYS be followed up with yet another 24-hour holter event monitor approximately one week later. This is important to gauge the efficacy of the protocols and can mean the difference between life and death.