This message is from: Gail Russell <g...@zeliga.com>
My husband has a heart that skips a beat. Not strictly a murmur, but I wonder if the vets are mislabeling an irregular heart beat (in terms of rhythm) as a "murmur." My understanding is that a murmur is a sound of a valve not closing and blood running where it is not supposed to be going. MY suspicion arises because my vet has told us that many TB's have a Wenkebach Type II Second degree Heart Block, like my husband's. She says their hearts are so large that the electrical signal does not get through every beat to the ventricle, so the heart tends to skip beats (the simplistic way of describing...here is the chart http://askdrwiki.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Second_Degree_Type_1_Wenkebach. Some of the list members will remember when we learned about this....after getting stuck in an Austrian hospital with the docs saying Jim could not leave without a pacemaker work up...after we landed there after a horse drawn carriage accident. At that time, I ended up using the list as a conduit to try to contact various people and get the heck out of Austria. Gail in Forestville CA Many years ago I had a TB who was in good health, sold him to a hunter jumper rider, he became reserve champion in the Orange County hunter jumper circuit. When I sold him, the person who vetted him said he had a heart murmur. My vet said that murmurs are common in TBs and wasn't concerned (he has a number of TB ranches in his equine practice. Important FjordHorse List Links: Subscription Management: http://tinyurl.com/5msa7e FH-L Archives: http://tinyurl.com/rcepw FH-L Shirts: http://tinyurl.com/8yky94l
