Chronic Renal (Kidney) Failure: Cat Health Care Tips

"Hi! I am Dr. Adrienne Mulligan and I am the owner of Camp Verde Veterinary Clinic and I am here today on behalf of expertvillage.com to talk to you about cat first aid and administration of medications. Now I want to talk about older cat diseases that you will find in cats that are generally 6-8 years or older and they usually require some form of chronic medication or diet change, things that you need to do with your cat for the rest of their life and then there are diseases that can be managed and they are not curable but they can be given a good quality of life. So the first one I want to talk about is chronic renal failure and this is where the kidneys fail to do their job and it usually occurs over six years of age and when kidneys stop doing their job, they do two things. One, they start building up toxins in the blood that they are supposed to be getting rid of and secondly they let too much water out of the blood go instead of keeping you nice and hydrated. If you were in the desert and did not have much water to drink and you had to go to bathroom, your urine would be very, very, very dark, because your kidneys would be making the water stay in your body but a cat with kidney failure cannot do that. Their kidneys just let the water go and no matter what so they get very dehydrated. So there is a lot of aspects to treating a cat with a renal failure. We are not going to go over all of those right here now but if your veterinarian does diagnose this in your cat, they can give you the information you need to help you with it. But the few things that I would like to just show you is that these cats really need to be on a low protein diet, a diet that is a very high quality protein but this one is called modified formula by IVD. There are many other brands that are made for cats with kidney failure. So this is one big part of treating cats with kidney failure."