Category Archives: Internal Medicine

When we recently reviewed our top performing blogposts, we found something interesting: the oldest post and the only top post specifically about cats focused on chronic kidney disease. Fourteen years later, the topic remains just as relevant. With World Kidney Day on March 12th highlighting Kidney Health for All, it’s worth remembering that kidney health matters for our feline family members too. A diagnosis of kidney disease in your cat can sound frightening. But in many cases, especially when detected early, feline chronic kidney disease can be managed for years, allowing cats to maintain an excellent quality of life.

I hear a great deal of confusion from pet families about the role of veterinary internal medicine specialists. Much of this confusion seems to come from trying to map human medicine definitions onto veterinary specialists. For example, my personal physician—the doctor I see for routine care such as flu vaccines, cholesterol monitoring and the occasional minor illness—is a board-certified internal medicine specialist with expertise in primary care. In veterinary medicine, however, board-certified internal medicine specialists (like those at the Schwarzman Animal Medical Center) do not typically provide routine care. Instead, they have additional training and skills to diagnose and manage complex medical conditions. In today’s blogpost, I will use the examples of pancreatic diseases to illustrate what a veterinary internal medicine specialist does and why their expertise matters.

This year’s theme for World Kidney Day (March 13) is “Are your kidneys OK? Detect early, protect kidney health.” The veterinary staff of the Schwarzman Animal Medical Center supports that sentiment entirely. Inspired by my colleagues’ work on protecting kidney health, today’s blogpost provides a “kidney primer,” curated from previous blogposts, to help pet families understand kidney disease and its treatment.

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is one of the most common disorders of cats and a common cause of mortality in older cats. Veterinarians don’t know what causes chronic kidney disease, but we know feeding a special diet helps cats with CKD maintain quality of life. In cats with CKD, kidney diets have been shown to be superior to regular adult cat food in limiting episodes of illness and death related to chronic kidney disease. Today’s blogpost will focus on the benefits of feeding your cat a kidney diet when they have a CKD diagnosis.

November is American Diabetes Month. While exact data is not available, diabetes is probably the second most common hormone disorder in cats, after hyperthyroidism. Approximately 0.08–1.24% of cats develop diabetes. Today’s blog focuses on prevention, remission and new treatments for feline diabetes.