Complete Care for Your Aging Cat - Amy Shojai [104]
Cats that develop blood clots may benefit from clot-reducing or blood-thinning drugs that reduce the “stickiness” of the blood and decrease the chance of new clots forming. Even without these drugs, about 40 percent of cats with rear-limb paralysis will regain use of their legs within a week. Those that do not recover from the paralysis may be returned to mobility using a wheelchair designed for cats, like the one pictured from K-9 Cart Company.
A diuretic drug forces the kidneys to eliminate excess salt and water. Drugs such as spironolactone increase the kidney’s ability to absorb sodium. Specially designed therapeutic diets low in sodium also help the cat compensate for the potassium, chloride and magnesium lost due to increased fluid loss, and helps prevent fluid retention. A variety of brands are available, so choose one that not only will be good for your cat, but also that she’ll readily eat.
Treatment for cardiomyopathy won’t cure the heart, but can eliminate some of the symptoms. When caught early, some heart damage can be reversed. With proper medication and monitoring, cats with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and congestive heart failure can live months to years, says Dr. Hoskins.
Nursing Alert!
Heart medications usually come in the form of pills, but sometimes as liquids. You’ll need to administer heart medicine for the rest of the cat’s life.
“If the animal can tolerate any variation in their diet, I will have the owner put the pill in a tiny bit of low-fat cream cheese or peanut butter or cheese,” says Dr. Schulman.
If a therapeutic diet is necessarily, make the switch gradually. Mix with the “regular” diet for the first several days to slowly introduce the change, and then increase the percentage of therapeutic diet day by day.
HYPERTHYROIDISM
Hyperthyroidism, though unrecognized in cats until 1979, has since become the most commonly diagnosed disease of the endocrine (hormonal) system in cats. “We see it in middle-aged to older cats,” says Rhonda L. Schulman, DVM, an internist at University of Illinois. “It’s definitely one of the most common problems in older cats.”
The cause remains unknown, but Dr. Duncan Ferguson, a veterinary scientist at the University of Georgia College of Veterinary Medicine, says the disease affects one in 300 cats older than seven. Risk factors for the disease include being fed a predominantly canned food diet, especially those containing giblets (two- three-fold risk) and exposure to cat litter (three-fold risk). Researchers don’t yet know what this means—if eating the canned food leads to the disease or the dry food helps protect from developing it.
Hyperthyroidism is the overactivity of the thyroid gland, which is a double-lobed gland located in the base of the cat’s neck. The gland manufactures and secretes the hormones thyroxine and triiodothyronine, which help regulate the body’s metabolism—the rate at which food and oxygen are burned for energy. For unknown reasons, one or both lobes of the thyroids of many elderly cats become enlarged and create a toxic nodular goiter that causes an overproduction of hormones. Basically, hyperthyroidism speeds up the metabolism, resulting in a variety of behavior and physical changes.
“Many hyperthyroid cats also have high blood pressure, and they may also have kidney insufficiency,” says Susan Little, DVM, a feline specialist in Ottawa, Canada. A study indicated that 87 percent of hyperthyroid cats had elevated blood pressure. “We think of those diseases as a group, a triple play. So if a patient has one, we look for the others.”
Diagnosis and treatment of feline hyperthyroidism has made great strides over the years. “It used to be these kitties would come in as a rack of bones,” says Me, DVM, a radiologist in Carlsbad, California. Today, veterinarians tend to catch