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AVMA Convention - Day One

Pat

Well-known member
Here is a quick report on day one of the AVMA convention. My head is so full that it is overflowing. It will be days before I can transcribe all of my notes, etc., but I hope to do a quick summary soon and then a more detailed one later. I want to be very precise and deliberate about my reporting. Just got home and I have to be heading back downtown in eight hours for day two.

I attended five hours of cardiology sessions - three with Jonathan Abbott and two with Meg Sleeper. There is definitely some newer thinking along with some revised medication protocols. I asked some very specific questions both during the sessions and afterward in private conversations with the two cardiologists so I have a good understanding of evolving recommendations. I will be making some noteworthy changes in what I recommend in this group and in my other Cavalier groups and canine congestive heart failure group based on today, and I will be sharing with Rod in the event he wants to address on his website. (In fact, I'll be cross-posting to all groups to which I belong.)

After the five cardiology sessions, I attended Curtis Dewey's session on Chiari-Like Malformation and then his session on brain tumors.

Here is the bad news - attendance at the convention is something like an estimated 10,000 (I heard that on the traffic report this morning and I'll try to confirm that). The cardiology sessions were packed with a couple hundred attendees each; people were sitting on the floor. I counted 15 attendees at the SM session, and at the end I recounted and 2 more people had joined the session. That tells me that U.S. vets think that SM is some obscure disease that they will not see in their daily practice. I'm not positive, but I think I was the only non-vet attending - if anyone hears of other Cavalier folks attending, please let me know as I'd love to chat with them.

I took good notes (and I have the speaker notes) - I was particularly interested in the statistics that Dr. Dewey quoted. Remember that this was directed at vets rather than Cavalier breeders/owners. (By the way, he focused entirely on Cavaliers for the presentation.) He had a slide listing "old views" and "new views" with info that I had not heard before, although I am not super knowledgeable about SM (as compared to my knowledge of acquired valvular disease) because I've never lived with dogs with symptomatic SM and I have lived with many dogs with acquired valvular disease. I asked some questions regarding the new views and medication recommendations.

There are more sessions tomorrow, and I will hopefully be able to ask some additional questions that I thought about on the drive home. Today alone (and there are two more days) was well worth the registration fee - I learned SO much!

Tomorrow's sessions include a presentation on SM by Andy Shores and another one by Sofia Cerda-Gonzalez so it will be interesting to compare those sessions with Dewey's.

Gotta go take care of my dogs and get some sleep, although I'm so full of questions and thoughts that it will be hard to fall asleep.

Pat
 
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Avma convention- day one

Here is a quick report on day one of the AVMA convention. My head is so full that it is overflowing. It will be days before I can transcribe all of my notes, etc., but I hope to do a quick summary soon and then a more detailed one later. I want to be very precise and deliberate about my reporting. Just got home and I have to be heading back downtown in eight hours for day two.

I attended five hours of cardiology sessions - three with Jonathan Abbott and two with Meg Sleeper. There is definitely some newer thinking along with some revised medication protocols. I asked some very specific questions both during the sessions and afterward in private conversations with the two cardiologists so I have a good understanding of evolving recommendations. I will be making some noteworthy changes in what I recommend in this group and in my other Cavalier groups and canine congestive heart failure group based on today, and I will be sharing with Rod in the event he wants to address on his website. (In fact, I'll be cross-posting to all groups to which I belong.)

After the five cardiology sessions, I attended Curtis Dewey's session on Chiari-Like Malformation and then his session on brain tumors.

Here is the bad news - attendance at the convention is something like an estimated 10,000 (I heard that on the traffic report this morning and I'll try to confirm that). The cardiology sessions were packed with a couple hundred attendees each; people were sitting on the floor. I counted 15 attendees at the SM session, and at the end I recounted and 2 more people had joined the session. That tells me that U.S. vets think that SM is some obscure disease that they will not see in their daily practice. I'm not positive, but I think I was the only non-vet attending - if anyone hears of other Cavalier folks attending, please let me know as I'd love to chat with them.

I took good notes (and I have the speaker notes) - I was particularly interested in the statistics that Dr. Dewey quoted. Remember that this was directed at vets rather than Cavalier breeders/owners. (By the way, he focused entirely on Cavaliers for the presentation.) He had a slide listing "old views" and "new views" with info that I had not heard before, although I am not super knowledgeable about SM (as compared to my knowledge of acquired valvular disease) because I've never lived with dogs with symptomatic SM and I have lived with many dogs with acquired valvular disease. I asked some questions regarding the new views and medication recommendations.

There are more sessions tomorrow, and I will hopefully be able to ask some additional questions that I thought about on the drive home. Today alone (and there are two more days) was well worth the registration fee - I learned SO much!

Tomorrow's sessions include a presentation on SM by Andy Shores and another one by Sofia Cerda-Gonzalez so it will be interesting to compare those sessions with Dewey's.

Gotta go take care of my dogs and get some sleep, although I'm so full of questions and thoughts that it will be hard to fall asleep.

Pat

AVMA CONVENTION -DAY ONE

Pat,

Thank-you so much for this , I will be Printing off the Information you can give to the List.

Bet
 
Thank yoiu so much for posting about the AVMA meetings. Do you know if there is a website where the presentations can be accessed? I would love to see the abstracts.
 
Thanks for the detailed update, Pat! Will drop you an email too. :) Really interesting stuff -- wish I could be there.
 
Thank yoiu so much for posting about the AVMA meetings. Do you know if there is a website where the presentations can be accessed? I would love to see the abstracts.

There is an AVMA website with all of the speakers’ notes, but it is password protected and there is a prominent statement there that notes are protected by copyright and cannot be printed for distribution, etc. The speakers’ notes will be available for a year and then removed for next year's convention, so I'm in the process of printing out everything and putting it into notebooks along with my notes from the sessions I attended. I'll also save electronically. Anyway, at this point I think I'm free to report on my notes from the sessions I attended and perhaps make brief references to other documents that I've read. It’s likely that the material will be released at some point (remember when we got the speaker’s notes from Dr. Gordon’s cardiology session about pimobendin at ACVIM conference some years back and how important those notes were to us?) and I'll keep the group updated. It will take me some time to transcribe all of my notes for my own records as I have three entire legal pads filled with notes. I'm working on an updated document with information on acquired valvular disease that I can crosspost to various groups if owners would like to use in Health FAQs and then I might work on documents for other health topics. I won't be doing this for SM as this is not my area of expertise and it's a tough subject matter. I'd do a better job on other internal medicine topics such as kidney and liver, etc., but I will post some general comments on the SM sessions that I attended.

The past three days were an incredible experience - so much so that I'll probably attend the convention next year in St. Louis. At the least, I will pay to register next year so that I have access to all of the speakers’ notes. But much more is covered in the sessions than in the notes. I attended nine sessions on cardiology, five on kidney, three on liver, one on pancreatitis, two on SM, one on brain tumors, one on vestibular, one on urinary incontinence, one on protein losing enteropathies, and one on "managing the problems of older dogs and cats." Cardiology and kidney sessions included canine and feline topics. I so wanted to attend some of the GI sessions and also sessions on end of life topics, genetics, emerging stem cell therapies, but I had to make choices as so many sessions are held in the same time slots.

I was somewhat surprised that most of the attendees seemed to be young vets, and this makes me wonder how older vets are keeping up with continuing education. As I mentioned earlier, although I keep up with the current literature closely on some topics such as cardiology and kidney, there are revised protocols now on treatment of MVD that I hadn't heard before Saturday. I will be doing different things with my current group of dogs as they develop heart disease than I did in the past few years. It was also interesting to hear the questions of attendees - some were brilliant and it was obvious that those asking were quite knowledgeable......other questions were very basic things that even I could answer. Most attendees were actively engaged and taking notes and asking questions, a few were nodding off in the back row and didn't have a notepad and pen. My preference, of course, would be to have a vet that had a lot of experience AND who is keeping current on continuing education.

Pat
 
There is an AVMA website with all of the speakers’ notes, but it is password protected and there is a prominent statement there that notes are protected by copyright and cannot be printed for distribution, etc. . . .

Pat:

Do you think it might be possible to contact the persons who spoke on SM and get permission to post their abstracts? Or if they have contact emails with the abstracts, could you send them to me (by private email to [email protected]) and I will request them myself? I would love to read them.

Thanks again for sharing.
 
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