What Is Fatty Liver Disease in Cats?

Video Transcript

"Fatty liver disease in cats is actually a disease caused by the fat metabolism affecting the liver in the cat. Unfortunately, this wouldn't normally happen in a cat that's outside and wild on it's own, and because the cat's liver is suited for the type of diet that it normally has in the wild--mice, small rodents that are very lean--and the cat usually doesn't have an opportunity or it never eats so much that it gets fat. Fatty liver disease happens when a cat is--and indoor cat usually, or a cat that's inside and outside, but a domestic cat that's been fed really well. Usually--I would say 90% of the time--it's actually overweight, and then for a couple of days or up to two weeks, they stop eating for one reason or another. It could just be sick for something, or it could be not access the food. Whatever is going on, it's not eating for a while, and when you don't eat, you start losing weight, and you start losing weight because your body starts using the caloric reserves that it naturally has. The common one to use, the body uses the fat stored in areas in your body. In order to get that fat out of your body, out of those storages and into your blood, it has to get metabolized through the liver, and so what happens is all that fat is thrown into the liver, and now you have actually fat globules within the liver cells themselves. This causes disruption in the way the liver can handle it, and the cats are getting sicker. The first thing you see with a cat with fatty liver disease is a cat that doesn't eat. Usually, any time, just like with people if you get hepatitis or if you have some type of liver problem, your appetite is really off. You might be acting well, otherwise you're just not eating. I have a list of things that, what type of animal or middle-aged cat that usually gets fatty liver disease. The cat is usually middle-aged. It's not necessarily a young cat or an old cat, but a healthy cat, or was healthy, because it was eating well and it was actually overweight, and it was obese, and recently has lost up to 25% of it's weight for some reason. Now, this doesn't necessarily have to be a liver problem initially, but then this weight loss causes the liver problem, and now it has a poor appetite. And, what you might also have is that as far as having vomiting or having other problems with diarrhea, about a third of the time the cat will also have those other issues, and the cat will become weak, obviously from not eating and not having a good diet, it's not become sick and weak. The other things you can notice with a cat with fatty liver problems is that sometimes they will be yellow, like the color of its eyes will have a yellow tint to it. Sometimes on the inside of its ears, where it's normally fairly white on a cat, that you have white ears, you can see a little yellow tint, and that's what we call jaundice, and that's another problem with liver damaged disease process that's causing from this extra fat in the tissues."