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Feline Diabetes (diabetes mellitus) cases are on the rise. According to WebMD, currently 1 out of every 400 cats has feline diabetes. No one knows for sure exactly what causes Feline Diabetes, but there are some things that seem to be strongly related. Feline Obesity is a huge risk factor for Feline Diabetes.
What is Feline Diabetes?
The cells that make up your cat’s body all need sugar (from food) for energy to do each of their jobs. If sugar can’t get into the cells, then the cells can’t perform their duties correctly. It would be like trying to operate your car without any gas in the tank. However, sugar can’t get into the cells without the help of a hormone produced by your cat’s pancreas called insulin. Problems with the interaction between the sugar, cells, and insulin cause the two different types of diabetes and hypoglycemia.
Feline Diabetes Type 1
Obesity is a big risk factor for Feline Diabetes
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When there isn’t enough insulin to pair with the amount of sugar in the blood stream, the sugar just starts piling up in the blood stream. This is where the high blood sugar counts start coming in. The lack of insulin in cases of Feline Diabetes Type 1 is because the part of the pancreas that produces the insulin (the beta cells) has been damaged.
Feline Diabetes Type 2
Sometimes fat cells in the cat’s body send out hormones that make other cells resistant to insulin. That means that even when the sugar is properly paired with insulin, the cells won’t accept it. As a result, the cells don’t get the energy they need. Feline Diabetes Type 2 has the characteristic of diminished ability to produce insulin, like Type 1, but it also adds this insulin resistance.
Hypoglycemia
On the flip side of things, sometimes more insulin is produced than there is sugar to pair it with. When this happens, any sugar that does enter the blood stream gets hoarded away by certain cells and the rest of the cells can’t get the sugar they need. This is often caused by a cat with Feline Diabetes receiving too large of a dose of insulin.
Common Symptoms of Feline Diabetes
If your cat is in the beginning stages of Feline Diabetes, these are the 4 symptoms you are most likely to notice.
- Excessive thirst and frequent urination.
When there is too much sugar in the blood stream the body works to balance itself out by flushing the extra sugar out through the urine. The cat’s kidneys go into overdrive. Of course, to create enough urine to get rid of the excess sugar, the kidneys will have to pull water from other parts of the body. - Excessive hunger.
When cells don’t get the sugar they need for energy, they ask the cat’s brain to send them more food. Unfortunately, without insulin to help the sugar get into the cells or if the cells have become insulin resistant, the cat could never eat enough food to satisfy this craving. - Weight Loss.
When the cells start getting desperate for nutrition, they begin depleting fat stores. Once fat stores run out, the cat’s body will start using its own muscles for nutrition.
If Feline Diabetes is left untreated it can result in a very dangerous medical condition called Ketoacidosis which should be treated as a medical emergency. Diabetic Neuropathy, a condition causing the lameness of the cat’s hind legs, can also result.
Diagnosis and Treatment
Diabetic Test Strips
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If you are concerned that your cat may have diabetes, please visit your veterinarian. There will be a combination of a physical exam and lab tests needed to arrive at a definitive diagnosis. Most likely, your veterinarian will need to find out what your cat’s blood sugar levels are and if there is any sugar present in the cat’s urine.
Treatment is usually a combination of medication and lifestyle changes. It is possible that your veterinarian will want to put your cat on a type of insulin that is taken orally. Most cats will need insulin injections.
Cats with Feline Diabetes should not be free fed. You will need to begin monitoring the food that your cat eats as well as testing your cat’s blood sugar (it requires pricking their ear). Keeping track of your cat’s blood sugar will help you to know just how much insulin your cat needs. Making sure that your cat gets proper exercise is also very important.
How Diet Can Help
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Veterinarians are beginning to favor a high protein, low carbohydrate diet for cats living with Feline Diabetes. Moving a cat away from dry foods and onto foods that are closer to what a cat’s natural diet can lessen the cat’s need for insulin. Changing the cat’s diet can even cause the Feline Diabetes to go into remission.
If you choose to change your cat’s diet, do so carefully. Monitor your cat’s blood sugar levels very closely as you switch over. Changing your cat over to a high protein, low carbohydrate diet from a high carbohydrate diet will more than likely affect the dose of insulin that your cat will need. Results could happen very quickly (the same day). Continuing to give your cat the same dosage of insulin while making this change could result in an overdose of insulin and Hypoglycemia. Always involve your veterinarian when making changes to your cat’s Feline Diabetes management plan.
Sources & Digging Deeper
Feline Diabetes – Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine
What is Feline Diabetes? – FelineDiabetes.com
Feline Diabetes – Lisa A. Pierson, DVM
Very informative thank you. One of my friends and his brother have feline diabetes. It can be tough on then sometimes. It has the same general characteristics as humans but many don’t believe cats are affected the same as humans. Thanks for this.
You are welcome. It is an important topic with how many cats are diagnosed with Feline Diabetes these days. You are right about cats having different reactions to the disease. Cats can recover completely from diabetes as where humans are normally stuck with it for life. Cats can go back and forth between having diabetes and not having diabetes. They also mask their symptoms, so it can be difficult to gauge what symptoms they are actually having. Those are the differences I found in my research, but I’m sure there are more.
This is really good information! One of our cats who came before had diabetes, and we are only now realizing how much we didn’t know and how poorly we managed it, even though we thought we were doing the best thing for him. Knowledge is so important to helping pets when they become ill.
Thank you so much! I agree with you. Sadly, a lot of people are uneducated about the disorders and diseases that they and their loved ones have. I hope that you don’t beat yourself up too badly over what you didn’t know. I totally understand how it is; I have a bad case of the “shoulda dones” for a cat I had before Cinco and Manna. Now I’m trying to learn all about what I didn’t know and pass that knowledge on to others as well. In a way, this blog chronicles my exploration of what I didn’t know about cats.
oral medications for feline diabetes are pretty ineffective and are not recommended by most people in the know.
Your first line of defense should be a diet change unless the cat’s glucose levels are dangerously high. It is far better to leave a cat with high glucose levels for a long time, then for them to fall too low for even an instant… since while once is damaging to the body, the later is deadly. Hypos can kill.
My cat was diagnosed when she was nine, and she lived until she was 16 when she passed of cancer. I’ve fostered a dozen or so others since her passing. I’ve started running into vets who start saying cats have diabetes when they are simply under stress from an illness and thus their sugars are high. My cat Ollie had very high glucose levels when he wasn’t feeling well once, and my Jack recently had high sugars when he was blocked. The evet kept telling me we needed to test for diabetes, mentioned it three times.. I finally told her to disregard the high sugars as he has been fine prior to this, and low and behold once they got him unblocked and rehydrated his sugars were fine.
“Sugar Cats” often have stress glucose releases, which is why trying to get a cat regulated on insulin while at the vet’s office is so hard on the cat. A cat who has had a diet change and still has high sugars should ‘start low and go slow’ on insulin.. no more than 1 unit BID and wait a couple of days to a week to see how it works with the cat. If you end up slightly overdosing a cat, you once again run right into a stress glucose release, and you end up stressing the body more, which often ends up with people giving more insulin, and you can see where that is going.. which is why the ability to test at home is so vitally important.
Thank you for sharing from your experience! I haven’t had a cat with diabetes. I have just been doing a lot of research on this because I have seen so many reports on it lately. I will make sure to keep all of this in mind if I write any further posts on the subject. Very interesting stuff.