What Causes Liver Problems in Cats?

Video Transcript

"There are several, cats have several problems dealing with liver disease. There are many problems that actually cause liver disease. There can be an infectious causes such as bacteria or viral diseases and there can also be a non-infectious causes. Some are diet related, some are genetically pre-disposed and then it depends also on a just like in people we also have tumors or cancer that can also be cause causing problems in cats but they are liver problems. The most common problems in cats with liver disease is actually one caused by diet or overeating basically. It's called fatty liver disease and what happens is that the cat normally if they're outside and hiding, they don't usually get this problem because the metabolism is such that they're eating a normal diet of mice and rodents and a very lean diet and they don't have an excessive amount of fat. But what happens with a cat that actually gets overweight, this they had a lot of fat stored and at some point something might happen where it ends up not being able to eat and the tissue on the within the fats start being released into the bloodstream and go into the liver and this is why they call the fatty liver syndrome or fatty liver disease because the fats get in the liver and the cat just doesn't know how to handle it because it don't the liver isn't designed to handle all the fat in a cat. So, they end up having some serious problems with that. Most of it just needs to be done as far as treatment. It's you can't, there's no liver replacement or products. We can't solve that problem but we just help the cat support, support him through that process of recovering and kind of eliminate either toxins that might be causing it to a bacterial infection. Whatever the original cause, even a tumor can sometimes be removed but liver disease and liver tumors are pretty serious and have a poor prognosis."