Cat Dental Diseases

Video Transcript

"Hi this is Dr. Greg McDonald for Expert Village.com. We are talking about dental disease in cats today and I wanted to emphasize some of the diseases that cats can get if their teeth are left dirty. The problem as we talked about earlier you’ve got the healthy tooth here where the gingivitis is not present. When little bit of gingivitis happens you can see redness of the gums right around the tooth. When you start getting early periodontitis, you can actually see there is a periodontal disease going on here because there is so much tartar built up on this tooth. This is going into moderate periodontitis where you actually see gum loss and you can see more tartar build up and more root exposed to the tooth. Here is an advance and this tooth is hardly staying in place and the periodontal disease here is actually threatening the life of this tooth. It is about to fall out and this is why we want to do the dental care that we talked about. Even more importantly than losing teeth is animals can eat just fine without their teeth at least in captivity like we call our domestic cats but we start seeing the bacteria that is associated with the periodontal disease can damage their heart, their liver or their kidney. Especially in older cats it is probably the single biggest disease that we see as cats age is kidney disease can be controlled by proper diet and also excellent care of your cat’s teeth throughout their whole life. "