Hello; first off- I am incredibly sorry about Selkie. Whenever you are able to answer, I am a silken windhound owner and would like to pursue holter testing. Without flat out buying one for myself, what are my options, and what do I do with the data?
Unfortunately you either have to purchase your own, or hope that someone else in the community who has purchased one will lend one to you. Asking in silken facebook groups might yield good results.
If you end up testing and receive the results from Alba Medical, you can submit them to Alba’s canine cardiologist for interpretation. Ideally you want 0 singles, 0 pairs, 0 runs, 0 complexities (and if you get that result, no need to pay more for the cardiologist). That means the dog had no arrhythmias in 24 hours.
I submitted a proposal to the International Silken Windhound Society to start a holter rental program, but 2 people spoke out against it because we don’t have a cardiologist to do a study on the breed (which would be awesome if we did, but IMO that is not the point of holter testing silkens at this time). It was brought up again a few months ago, and those same people shot it down again.
The breed founder is now convinced that it’s pointless because we can’t discern the deadly arrhythmias from the survivable ones. My thought is that at the very least, the breed needs to be monitoring cardiac health in every possible avenue because the two main founding breeds BOTH have known cardiac problems. If we test a bunch of silkens and they all turn out to be completely free of a electrical abnormalities, then it’s still money and time well spent. But we do not know until we test.