Dogs and cats presenting with respiratory disease can be both a diagnostic and therapeutic challenge; not least because it can often be difficult to decide whether the problem is a primary respiratory disorder or a problem secondary to cardiac disease and there is the additional challenge of determining what part of the respiratory tract is likely to be compromised and thus where we should focus our investigations.
All of this is not helped by the traditional way of differentiating parts of the respiratory system as "upper" and "lower" - especially when there is no clear consensus on where "upper" finishes and "lower" starts. This lecture will explore a different way of approaching these often frustrating primary respiratory problems placing greater emphasis on the clinical signs as the key to determining the part of parts of the respiratory tract most likely to be involved and to give some guidance around the types of pathology likely to be present.