In my feline specialty practices, we had weekly training meetings to teach our staff people excellence in medical knowledge and customer service. One Wednesday, I was doing a lecture on Feline Hyperthyroidism, and one of my staff people remarked at the end of it, "That sounds like the perfect disease to have". From her perspective, it would be, since she was extremely overweight. She weighed three hundred and fifty pounds.
What this staff person liked about hyperthyroidism though, was that if you have it, you can eat more and more and still lose weight. That is the pathognomonic symptom for feline hyperthyroidism. A client comes in and says, "You know, it's the strangest thing, my cat keeps eating more and more, yet he is losing weight!" Surely it is hyperthyroidism. We always do the tests though to confirm.
The cause of feline hyperthyroidism is not exactly known, though two theories predominate. One is the excess of iodine in commercial cat foods that contain a large percentage of ocean fish products in them. The other is that the left recurrent jugular artery beats against the left thyroid gland in a cat and causes it to become tumified. This theory is supported by the fact that the left thyroid gland in a cat is more often the one causing hyperthyroidism than is the right.
Treatment of this condition has three choices. First, is suppressing the thyroid function in the cat with a drug called Methimazole. Second, is surgical removal of the tumified and hyperfunctioning thyroid gland. Third, and most popular today, is radioactive destruction of the thyroid tissues with Iodine 131, which is given by injection and requires a two week stay at a veterinary hospital.
Hyperthyroidism is most commonly seen in older cats as a lifetime of thyroid gland tumification finally results in too much thyroxine entering a cat's blood stream. The condition must be treated, though it is not an emergency, and cats live on with the condition even if it is not treated. The veterinary community still researches why feline hyperthyroidism is on the rise in cats. My personal thinking is that it is not rising in the cat population, but instead, it is becoming more accurately diagnosed. The first veterinarian I worked for as a boy rarely did blood panels and tests on his patients. Today, forty years later, in-house diagnostics are very sophisticated, and Vet Labs are even more sophisticated still. Blood tests and blood panels are a daily routine in modern day practice.
The diseases have always been there, now we are finally diagnosing and treating them correctly.
Dr. Doug Ikeler http://www.drdougikeler.com/
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