Skip to main content
What types of page to search?

Popular pages: Undergraduate Postgraduate PhD Accommodation Research International students

Alternatively use our A-Z index.

Cases required

From time to time we will post details here of requests for patients to participate in research studies. These are directed to our referring vets. If you are a pet owner and are interested in participating a study you see here, please speak to your vet.

Clinical trial for cats with congestive heart failure due to cardiomyopathy

We are one of a number of UK, European and USA centres involved in a clinical trial testing a novel drug for congestive heart failure in cats due to cardiomyopathy (most commonly this will be due to hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM)).  The cat must be stable with well-controlled congestive heart failure on permitted medication (furosemide or torasemide, clopidogrel and possibly also an Angiotensin-Converting Enzyme (ACE) inhibitor). The costs of the screening visit will be covered.

If the cat meets the inclusion criteria and the owner gives their informed consent for the cat to be permitted, the costs of these visits will be covered by the sponsor company. However, if the cat requires emergency referral for stabilisation of congestive heart failure, these costs before becoming stable will normally be charged to the client.

If you are a vet and think that you have a suitable case, please call the hospital for more information and to discuss your patient with the cardiology service.

If you are an owner who has a cat with heart failure, please ask your primary care vet to contact us to discuss the possibility of being included in this study.    

We really need more evidence about how best to treat cats with cardiomyopathy and congestive heart failure and this study will help gather that.

Update on Great Dane dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) study

We thank all the vets, owners and of course Great Danes who were included in this study, which has been running since 2008, with various grants, most recently from the Kennel Club Charitable Trust and the Great Dane breed council (since 2016). Sadly, this funding has now ended.  However, the research from the screening test results still continues. So you can still help:

  • Please update us with the status of your Great Dane(s) previously screened by us.  We may contact you for updates of Danes in our study, if you have consented to this.
  • DCM can affect about 36% of all Great Danes - that is over one in three Great Danes at some point during their lives. So, even though our funding has ended, we support screening of Great Danes and offer this at a reduced cost compared to our clinical cases. This will be Echo (heart ultrasound scan) and Holter (24 hour ECG monitoring heart rhythm) as a minimum but we can do full health testing and cardiac biomarker testing as well. It is important to know about whether your apparently healthy Great Dane has DCM since treatment can slow down progression of the condition.