Feline Medicine

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In 2005 Eli Lily announced the discontinuation of the majority of animal derived source insulins in addition to the lente and ultralente lines of product. This changed the landscape of veterinary diabetic management. Ultimately, the best insulin for your patient may be the one you are most familiar with; however, general guidelines will help choose the insulin that will give you the best success with your patients.

The premise of this presentation is that feline medicine is good business. The keys to tapping into this market are several: understanding the significance of the feline market in your practice today and its future potential, understanding the psyche of the feline client and recognizing the different psychographic profile of cat vs. dog owners, using preventative medicine, specifically feline total parasite control, as a tool to practice better feline medicine, and, ultimately, realizing an increased feline average per client charge by practicing a higher quality feline medicine.

It has been estimated that at 25 to 33% of cats are either overweight or grossly obese, with the highest rates seen in middle-aged cats. Yet the 2003 AAHA Compliance Study (The Path to High-Quality Care) found that veterinarians are significantly under diagnosing feline obesity. Owners also may not recognize when their cat is overweight, nor be aware of the associated health risks. Obesity should be the easiest disorder to diagnose, but it is also one of the hardest to treat.

The recognition of the development of potentially malignant tumors arising from injection sites became one of the most significant events in veterinary medicine in the 1980's and beyond. So significant, in fact, that it caused an entire profession to re-evaluate the way preventative medicine should be considered from a medical and an economic perspective.

Mycoplasma species have been isolated in our laboratory from cats with URTD (Veir et al 2004) and have been detected at a higher rate in cats with URTD than normal cats by other authors (Bannasch and Foley 2005). However, they are readily detected in the oropharynx and nasal cavity of normal cats as well (Randolph et al 1993, Tan et al 1977).

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The cat is considered a resistant, yet susceptible host for Dirofilaria immitis. Worm burdens are much lower in cats than in dogs (average 15 worms in dogs and 1-3 in cats in endemic areas) and about 1/3 of feline infections involve worms of the same sex. Feline heartworm (HW) was first described in the 1920s; awareness has increased greatly since the introduction of Heartgard for cats in 1997 and the associated marketing campaign. Feline HW remains a difficult to diagnose, yet fully preventable disease.