Cardiac Disease in Senior Boston Terriers

This is the most valuable thing an owner of a dog with a murmur can do, and it costs nothing.

Wait until your Boston is genuinely asleep - not dozing, not panting, properly asleep in a cool room. Watch the chest and count each full rise-and-fall as one breath, for thirty seconds, and double it. A normal resting rate for most dogs is under about thirty breaths per minute, and healthy dogs are usually well below that.

Do this a few times a week while your dog is stable, and you build a personal baseline. That baseline is the point of the exercise. Fluid accumulating in the lungs pushes the sleeping rate up before there is any cough, any lethargy or anything else you would notice - and a rise from your dog's own normal, sustained across a couple of days, is a reason to phone the practice rather than wait for the next appointment.

Count while asleep, not while resting awake, and not in a warm room. Panting invalidates the count entirely, which is a genuine complication in this breed and a reason to be patient about when you do it.

In a short-faced breed this is a genuinely difficult distinction, and getting it wrong in either direction wastes time. Neither pattern is diagnostic on its own - they narrow the question for the vet rather than answering it.

If you think your Boston has cardiac disease, the plan is three steps: write down what you have seen and when it started, book a veterinary appointment rather than waiting for the next flare, and take video of the behaviour or symptom before you go — the thing you are worried about rarely happens in the consulting room. Screening in the parents covers brachycephalic airway syndrome (boas), patellar luxation, cataracts.

What the vet visit should produce is a diagnosis and a written plan, not just reassurance: what is being ruled out, what the monitoring interval is, and which signs mean you come back sooner. Ask what the treatment costs across a year rather than per visit, because that is the number that decides whether you are managing this condition or reacting to it.

Between appointments, keep a short log — dates, what you saw, what changed. It is the single most useful thing an owner brings to a follow-up, and for cardiac disease it is often what separates a clear pattern from a guess.