My malti-poo has been on Revolution for his 11 years of life….so why would I put him thru a blood test every year to determine whether or not his ‘might’ contract heartworm??? So each and every year, for the last 10 years I have signed a waiver to not have him tested. I know he will live another 5-6 years if not more. Vets pull at an owners heart strings, and make them feel guilty if they do not authorize a heartworm blood test….save your money, and sign the waiver!!

Brianne, I adopted a dog from a shelter and she was high heartworm positive. A friend had told me about treatment with Doxycycline and now, 15 months later, my babygirl is heartworm free!! And yes, more people need to be made aware of this! Excellent post!!

Thanks for adopting from DDB! We foster for a group that has worked with DDB in the past.

I got an iPad 2 32-GB for $21.68 and my girlfriend loves her Panasonic Lumix GF 1 Camera that we got for $ 38.76 there arriving tomorrow by UPS. I will never pay such expensive retail prices in stores again. Especially when I also sold a 40 inch LED TV to my boss for $ 657 which only cost me $ 62.81 . Here is the site we use to get it al from, http://to.ly/aX2I

That’s great, Cassie!

Hi Chase, this is an excerpt from the article my vet path and I reviewed. So you’d have to convert kg to lbs and weight your dog. Then for every pound, it’s 10mg. So say Squiggy is 20 lbs which is about 9.07 kg. So 9.07 x 10mg/kg = 90.7 mg per dose. BID = twice a day = ~200mg per day. So he is going to get one 100mg dose in the morning and one 100mg dose in the evening.

His vet suggested a 4 week treatment on and then 3-4 months off after which he’d get another heartworm test to see if it’s negative. If not, and if Immiticide is then available, we’d try the Immiticide and seeing as how we prepped him with Doxy, it should work even better than it would have by itself. I would highly suggest taking this info to your vet, though, to discuss it.

If you want to post your email address, I will email you the full article from my vet path but here is the excerpt:

The American Heartworm Society (AHS) recently updated its guidelines for treatment of heartworm infection in dogs. It says, “Studies have shown that heartworm-positive dogs pretreated with ivermectin and doxycycline prior to receiving melarsomine (Immiticide) injections had less pulmonary pathology associated with the death of the heartworms. If doxycycline is incorporated into a heartworm treatment protocol it should be given before administration of melarsomine so the Wolbachia organisms and their metabolites are reduced or absent when the worms die and fragment. Doxycycline administered at 10mg/kg BID for four weeks has been shown to eliminate more than 90 percent of the Wolbachia organisms and the levels remain low for three to four months.

”For dogs who are not treated with Immiticide, the guidelines say, “the use of a monthly ivermectin-based heartworm preventive along with doxycycline could be considered. It has been reported that ivermectin and doxycycline administered periodically over 36 weeks resulted in a 78 percent reduction in adult worm numbers. Moreover, microfilariae from dogs treated with doxycycline that were ingested by mosquitoes developed into third-stage larvae that appeared to be normal in appearance and motility, but these larvae were not able to develop into adult worms, thus negating the risk of selecting for resistant strains.

The administration of doxycycline at 10 mg/kg BID for a four-week period every three to four months should eliminate most Wolbachia organisms and not allow them to repopulate.”

I hope she’s ok!