Complete Care for Your Aging Cat - Amy Shojai [81]
Occasionally certain families of cats show a predispositions for cancers, but these show up pretty early in the cat’s life. Cancers are more likely to develop as a consequence of a lifetime accumulation of injuries or insults, says Dr. Kitchell. “We’re seeing the extremely old geriatrics, like the nineteen-year-old cats that come in with cancer,” she says. “We tend to see more carcinomas in the elderly, maybe because carcinomas appear most often in epithelial tissues [such as skin].” Skin, lungs, and bladder tissues are more likely to be affected by contact with the outside world, so damage from the sun over a lifetime ultimately causes old-age cancer.
There’s added concern with geriatric cats. “When you reach that advanced age, you lose a lot of reserve capacity in a variety of your organs, like your liver and kidney function,” says Dr. Kitchell. “We have to be so careful with what we try to give to very geriatric patients when we try to treat them.”
Encouraging news from researchers at Purdue University suggests that the “oldest-old” among pets, similarly to very old humans, seldom develop lethal cancers.
Cats that don’t develop cancer until very old probably have a better chance of surviving it because of the same extreme good health that has allowed them to live so long. “Just because they’re old doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be treated,” says Susan G. Wynn, DVM, a certified veterinary acupuncturist in Marietta, Georgia.“If you take, for instance, a twelve-year-old cat with lymphoma, we’ve had lymphoma cats live another four years or longer.”
Reducing Risk
Many feline cancers are associated with feline leukemia virus (FeLV) and feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV). A number of preventative vaccines are available for FeLV, but it has taken many years to develop similar protection against feline AIDS.
Dr. Niels Pederson, DVM, an international authority on these viruses at University of California-Davis, and immunologist Janet Yamamoto, a professor at University of Florida, first identified FIV in 1986. Dr. Yamamoto has since worked with Fort Dodge Animal Health to develop an effective vaccine, resulting in the USDA approving the first FIV vaccine in early 2002. Take these steps to protect cats from FeLV and FIV, and reduce their risk of associated cancers:
Keep cats indoors to reduce exposure from infected cats.
Quarantine and test new cats before introducing them to resident cats
Consider FeLV and FIV preventive vaccinations for high-risk cats—those adopted as strays, from shelters, living in multicat households, and cats allowed outdoors.
Diagnosis
We often are anxious to get that “thing” removed from our cat as quickly as possible, and the key to successful treatment is early intervention. But saving time and cost by removing the tumor before knowing the diagnosis can be dangerous, cautions Nicole Ehrhart, VMD, a cancer surgeon at Colorado State University. “You may disrupt tissue planes that might have been barriers for spread of that tumor,” she says. “What could have been a perfectly curable cancer with just surgery alone has been compromised.” Without an advanced diagnosis, a hurried surgery could result in spreading the cancer so it’s harder to treat, or cannot be treated at all.
She says the best first step in diagnosing lumps is a needle biopsy. Usually no anesthetic is required, and it involves merely inserting a needle and withdrawing a few cells. “They look at them on a slide or send off to a pathologist,” says Dr. Ehrhart. The needle biopsy offers a good indication if caution is needed with further tests—perhaps taking just a tiny piece of the tumor for laboratory analysis.