…large house cats that is…We have had a number of Maine Coon cats over the years. We love their looks, their personality and their big huggable size bodies. Unfortunately, we lost two of them to cardiac myopathies and were told the breed was particularly susceptible to hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM). From this article, it appears it’s not the breed, just the size, and Maine Coons in general are just big cats. If you have a big kitty, periodic checking for a heart murmur is a good idea. “Conclusions and clinical relevance: These data suggested that among the study cats, those with HCM were skeletally larger, but not more obese, than healthy cats. Whether this was attributable to differences in early growth or other causes requires additional investigation.” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18672971/
The author affiliations are “Department of Clinical Sciences, Tufts Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine, North Grafton, MA 01536, USA.” PubMed is affiliated with the National Library of Medicine at the NIH and contains tomes of all sorts of things even remotely related to medicine. There are also a lot of DVMs that circulate through NIH. When we had one of our cats over at a Leesburg specialty center, I recognized this guy from having met him several times at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda. Nice guy! https://www.ethosdiscovery.org/team-member/chand-khanna/