The EPIC Study has been published!

[RodRussell]

The EPIC Study concludes that pimobendan can prolong pre-heart failure by 15 months in MVD-affected dogs with echo and x-ray evidence of heart enlargement.
http://www.cavalierhealth.org/mvd2.htm#The_EPIC_Study

[Kate H]

I'm glad the word 'evidence' is there - hopefully vets won't just prescribe it for dogs with, say, a grade 4 murmur or even in heart failure who actually don't yet have an enlarged heart. Though the woeful ignorance of some vets in the UK, who must have been treating Cavaliers with MVD for years but still put them on medication at the first signs of a murmur, never ceases to amaze me! Thanks for posting the conclusions.

Kate and Ruby

[Karlin]

I feel this approach would have benefitted some of my cavaliers that have now passed on -- at least two were probably in this situation. Glad the study was done.

[RodRussell]

I find the EPIC Study disappointingly flawed and troubling.
http://www.cavalierhealth.org/blog.htm#October_3,_2016

[Kate H]

Having lost three of my own Cavaliers with MVD and spoken to many other owners with dogs in heart failure, it always seems to me a very individual disease - some dogs go into heart failure and die almost immediately, some can keep going for a couple of years. And some of the research is rubbish - when my kibble-fed Aled died at the age of 7.5, having been in heart failure for 7 months, a supremely tactless friend sent me information about research proving that kibble-fed Cavaliers went into heart failure significantly earlier than those fed raw. To which I replied that this is impossible to prove, since there is no agreed age by which all Cavaliers with MVD will go into heart failure, so no way of measuring whether some go in earlier and some later as a result of what they are fed. Some researchers seem to need to validate their own agenda, rather than look at what is actually there - it's a shame if a large and expensive study like the EPIC one comes into that category.