My name is Sam Meisler and I am small animal veterinarian. Today, we’re going to talk about diabetes.
What is diabetes? Essentially in the dog and cat, diabetes refers to the inability to remove glucose or sugar out of the blood and into the tissues.
This inability results from the lack of insulin. Insulin is normally produced by the pancreas but for whatever reason, these dogs have become diabetic or these cats have become diabetic lose their ability to produce insulin. Without that ability to remove glucose or sugar from the blood stream into the tissues, a variety of symptoms develop.
Most common symptom we see first off is an increased thirst and increased urination. When the glucose gets to a certain level in the blood, it will spill over to the urine and glucose is a very large molecule. It will pull water with it and that is why you get to increase urination, to make up with that, the dog has to drink more water and that is why you see that symptom.
The other symptom we see is weight loss. A lot of these dogs and cats were over weight to begin with but then we start to see weight loss after that. And the reason that happens is because without the ability to remove glucose into the tissues, we lose weight. The body has to break down fats in order to make up for these lost energy.
As the diabetes progresses, we’ll see other symptoms develop like inappetence and vomiting. This can occur when the dog goes into what is called a ketoacidotic state, during ketoacidosis,, the dog has completely shut down its sugar metabolism and is not digesting or metabolizing its fats.
If your dog or cat is already in the ketoacidotic state, then often they are hospitalized and put on IV fluids for 24 to 40 hours while the glucose is brought under control. If your dog or cat is not in the ketoacidotic state, sometimes we can treat at home by instructing you how to inject the insulin and this will be done on a once an day or twice a day basis and teach you how to do that and go from there.
This is a long term problem that your dog or cat has and it may involve multiple visits to check glucose levels, sometimes we even do a fructose level which is sort of a test that collectively analyzes whether we’ve been controlling the insulin and the glucose level properly. Your pet will have potential problems develop but it is something we can try to control and give your dogs or cats some continuous quality of life.
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