Losal,
I didn’t read Mellissaandcrew’s comment as trying to be anything but informative. She did preface it by saying she has fallen behind on research.
Each person has to decide for themselves what is the best course of treatment. When faced with the decision there is no way to know what I’d actually do. Certainly with a new dog, one that hadn’t been on a good prevention program or any dog with any signs of heartworm disease, I’d use immiticide. I think if my dogs currently came up heartworm positive I would likely use Immiticide. They are active dogs and from what I’ve read the lung/artery damage is most evident in an active dog when undergoing “slow kill”. I wouldn’t want to exercise restrict, potentially for years, until the worms were gone.
But I could also see myself as reasoning that they have been on preventative, likely have a low worm burden and consider “slow kill”. Immiticide isn’t 100% and even after treatment it is still possible to have worms remain.
With slow kill I may fret more in regards to “are they really gone”? This can be a concern with any method of removal but I read that when using slow kill method dogs may revert to a negative antigen test but still be worm positive. This is because of antibody formation that ties up antigen. http://veterinarymedicine.dvm360.com/symbiosis-parasitology-heartworm-recommendations-updated?rel=canonical
I hope to never be faced with having to make that decision, it would be heart wrenching. I do all I can do to prevent HWD by giving my dogs heartworm preventative once a month all year round.
Wishing only the best for you and Turbo.
