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Hi, everybody. Sorry for our hiatus. My name’s Dr. Erica Barron, and this is Ellen Carozza, our head technician here at NOVA Cat Clinic in Arlington, Virginia. And today, feel free to pop in any questions wherever. But we’re going to talk about inflammatory bowel disease in cats. In people, it’s called inflammatory bowel syndrome, but we call it disease because it’s a disease. So today, we’re just going to go through the beginning of it, and we’re going to go through how and why it happens, and we’re also going to talk about symptoms of it and signs. So Ellen, I feel like we talk about poop a lot.We do a lot of stuff. We do a lot of fecal analysis in house, including stains and everything as well. We’re always handling poop.It’s true. And then we always talk to people about what you see in the box, so here we go doing that again. So why don’t you start talking about the guts and just what the normal gut does, and then we’ll talk about what happens when it gets diseased.Well, the difference between the feline patient, because they’re true carnivores versus your omnivores patient, is you are always going to have different lengths of your intestine because cats have a very short intestinal tract. They also have different flora as well with their intestinal tract as wellSo anyway, what happens is IBD basically is this huge inflammatory process that can be caused by numerous things. And so when the cat usually is presented for poop issues, it’s usually because the cat’s been having chronic diarrhea for a long time, and your veterinarians have ruled all sorts of parasites. We have done fecal stains and cultures on them, and those have come up completely normal. The flora might be a little off, but it’s not responding to treatment, and food isn’t helping. So what’s next that we have to do is look at it from a different point of view. And that’s when the veterinarian really starts looking at the other diagnostics that they’re going to use other than just asking about litter box habits. What does it look like? What does it smell like unfortunately? Please bring in multiple, multiple samples. Yes, last night’s food might come out 45 minutes later because like I said, the intestinal tract is really short on cats, and when you have IBD sometimes, that intestinal tract is on overdrive, and that food is going to come out very quickly. Sometimes really not even digested in certain cats. So what happens next after you have done all the poop stuff?So real fast, and I just want to talk a little bit more about the GI tract. So going off of what Ellen said, in cats, it’s much shorter, and in the small intestine, if you think of the small intestine like a tube, and in this tube, on the inside of the tube, there’s all these little guys, the microvilli. And as there’s chronic inflammation, whether that be as Ellen said from dietary issues that don’t agree or just the natural change in what a cat does now than it used, the micro biome isn’t what it used to be. Our micro biomes are supposed to have a trillion different species of gut bacteria in them, and now we don’t. And that’s why everybody talks about prebiotics and probiotics, and all those things.But the importance of this micro biome is that not only are we feeding ourselves, but we’re feeding our gut flora, and if that gut flora isn’t right, these microvilli that are like this are going to get shorter and shorter and fatter and fatter, and then the cell walls of the intestine are going to get thicker and thicker and thicker and not pull the nutrients out as well. And then that causes kind of things to go faster through because things aren’t being absorbed properly.Right. And including water, because you have to remember the colon is the area where you absorb all the water and you’re supposed to have that nice formed stool. When you have all that inflammation that is impossible to happen.Right. And that’s why when we palpate cats and dogs and when you’re doctor palpates you, I assume they do this too. We feel your gut. We feel the cat’s gut. We want to make sure it’s not thick. It’s not ropy. We don’t want to feel an abnormal area. We want it to all be smooth and happy. So when that happens, Paracelsus or the act of things going through the GI tract gets all messed up and things don’t get absorbed properly. The cats start to lose weight. They might start having vomiting as well. They might have diarrhea. Sometimes it seems illogical, but sometimes they start having other issues with the colon. They don’t just have loose stools. Sometimes they don’t make–Like mucous or bloody stool.or when they do make stool, it’s really, really yucky. There could be dry blood. There might be black tarry. So there’s a lot of different symptoms. So we have to kind of start with the basics, and as Ellen said, rule out GI parasites. Rule out dietary and things like that. And then kind of look at the clinical signs. Is this a young cat? Do you sort of fall into the age when we think you would have a food allergy or a food sensitivity? Is it just that you need probiotics? Some cats, just like some people, just need probiotics. Think of all the people who once they started drinking kombucha, they’re magically a different person, and they feel way better. Because of this leaky gut syndrome, it could be causing so many different signs in these cats. It can cause poor hair coat. It could cause secondary stomatitis because the pH of your body changes. I always feel like when the pH of your body changes, there should be a urinary sign, but I don’t feel like there usually is. But in my head, I’m like, “If there’s a pH in your body change, there should be more urinary signs” but there never are, so don’t worry about that. Just not feeling well like they don’t want to be touched. They hurt being in inflammatory distress. It’s really miserable. You just don’t feel well anywhere. You’re exhausted. You’re tired. They might want to just be by themselves even more. Instead of sleeping like 20 hours a day, they’re sleeping 22 hours a day. So those are the things I usually think about, and then again, one of the most common signs we see cats for with inflammatory bowel disease is issues in the litter box.Yeah. Either they’re not using the litter box or they’re going too often.Right. And then they start going outside the litter box because they either can’t make it or because it’s not clean enough for them to use because cats don’t like to go in the bathroom if it’s not clean.You know it’s like the Renaissance Festival in the summer time when you had to– you’re holding it as long as you possibly can and finally let go and, “Oh my gosh, I have to pee so bad in this middle of August or September at the Ren Fair” and you just want to scream and cry and go in the woods instead of using the [poor?] potty. It is that bad, and that is how your cat sees litter box when it’s not scooped that often. It’s horrifying. Nobody wants to use a bathroom like that.Yeah. So you’ve got to scoop it at least once a day, and then you got to clean the whole thing out at least once a week.And if you remember the rule of thumb is one box per cat plus one extra.Yes, and plus one. I feel like we should say cat plus one, but that might be confusing because you have to have one for the cat. I know one person once described it as there’s one for the house and one for the cat. And I was just like, “But the house doesn’t use it”. And they were like, “No, it’s just for the house”. Then I just let it go.I don’t know. So, anyway, that’s what we’re going to talk about today series part one. So, to wrap up again, inflammatory bowel disease is a big group of things that cause GI issues. And it takes a long time to sort of sort out who and where and what is happening. So we have to make sure we do fecals. We have to do cultures. We have to check on your micro– check on the gut flora, see if there’s an imbalance of the gram-positives or gram-negatives if there’s clostridium. And we do that with gram stains. We also have to think about considering one of the things we didn’t talk about was testing the cobalamin, testing some of the micronutrients to see how that’s going. And then the whole idea about how this microbiome, and I’m sorry I keep using my fingers as villa, but it should be like this. You should have good junctions. All of these microvilli should be able to digest your food, or the cat’s food and then with chronic inflammatory responses, they get shorter and shorter and shorter and fatter and fatter, and then the GI tract, the walls of the intestine gets thicker and thicker and thicker and are not able to digest food, and then it just comes out of the other end.So next time, we’re going to talk about what we can do about this, like different options. And we’re also going to talk about different ways we can decide if it’s truly inflammatory bowel disease because unfortunately, it’s not always inflammatory bowel disease. It could be other types of things like cancer, and that is important for us to figure out so we can treat the cats appropriately.Yeah. Inflammation is no joke and unfortunately, we’re seeing a lot of it in our feline patients. And so it’s important that if you do notice something crapping up with your cat, it’s better to have them seen sooner before the problems really start to get out of hand. The doctors are able to use it to get better diagnostics and get everything under control at earlier portions of a disease versus waiting for it to really become exasperated and becoming a true problem that they need to actually work on.So thanks for spending this time with us. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to comment below. If there’s something you want us to talk about, please let us know because this is why we’re talking to you about IBD today because somebody asked. And we will be back, hopefully sometime next week to talk to you about part two of IBD. I know you can’t wait until then, and you’re going to count down the days. It’s so exciting.
Right. How do we diagnose it? How do we fix it? What do we do next? It’s so great. Yes. We’ll go over it next week.