Telemetry of cardiac left ventricular pressure in conscious dogs

A fully implantable telemetric system for the measurement of cardiac left ventricular pressure and derived parameters in conscious dogs is presented. It provides the following advantages: ethical acceptability, scientific relevance, economical experimentation, avoidance of stress-induced situations for the animal, experiments without anaesthesia or sedation. The system has an operation time which allows the sequential pharmacological evaluation of a great number of drugs in individual dogs as has been shown by testing the effect of the positive inotropic agent, dobutamine, and the calcium antagonists, verapamil and nifedipine.