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Assessment of Blood Pressure with Pulse Quality | VETgirl Veterinary CE Podcasts

In this VETgirl online veterinary continuing education podcast, we interview Dr. Erica Reineke, DACVECC, an Assistant Clinical Professor in Emergency Critical Care at University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine on a recent paper that she published. In this JVECC publication, she evaluates systolic blood pressure measurement based on physical examination as compared to Doppler analysis. In this prospective, observational study, the authors evaluated 102 cats that presented to the emergency services and evaluated the femoral and dorsal pedal pulse to predict systolic blood pressure in cats. House officers (e.g., interns, residents) evaluated pulse quality and defined it as either: strong, moderate, poor, or absent.  A concurrent SBP was also performed. What’d they find?

Overall, if you can’t feel the metatarsal and femoral pulses, your cat is massively hypotensive – typically wiht a median systolic blood pressure of 30 mm Hg (range, 30–105 mm Hg). Cats with strong strong metatarsal pulses had a median SBP of 135 mm Hg (range, 58–210 mm Hg). If you can’t feel dorsal metatarsal pulses in cats, it typically meant that the blood pressure was approximately 75 mm Hg. The point? Cats are massively hypotensive by the time they lose their pedal pulse… which should make you tachycardiac…

References:

  1. Reineke EL, Rees C, Drobatz KJ. Prediction of systolic blood pressure using peripheral pulse palpation in cats. J Vet Emerg Crit Care, 2015, early online release.

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