animals got heart disease

Dr. Barbara Natterson-Horowitz is a sort of modern day Dr. Dolittle.

For the past six years, the UCLA cardiologist has been consulting with the Los Angeles Zoo to help treat diseases found in animals. Natterson-Horowitz said she was surprised to learn how much human and veterinary medicine have in common.

"Animals suffer from almost all of the diseases that human beings do, but veterinarians and physicians never talk about this," she said. "Physicians have not typically, traditionally, seen veterinarians as their clinical peers and that's unfortunate."

Her work became the focus of her new book, "Zoobiquity: What Animals Can Teach Us about Health and the Science of Healing," which she co-wrote with science writer Kathryn Bowers. The book calls for an approach to medicine that crosses the species barrier. It argues that studying diseases found in both a human and an animal could save both lives.

"Do animals get cancer? Do animals get heart disease? Do animals maybe eat in ways that make them obese? And are there ways that they naturally have to take the weight off as being animals on the planet? And what I realized is that we are much more similar to other creatures, than we are different," Bowers said.

Natterson-Horowitz's work began after she attended a sleepover at the L.A. Zoo with her young daughter. She struck up a conversation with some of the veterinarians who ended up enlisting her help in cardiac cases.

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