Diabetes Awareness Month With VisioCare Services
A diagnosis of pet diabetes can often be just the start of a long and often stressful process of working in synergy with your veterinarian to find stability with the condition for your pet.
Diabetes is a condition that affects your pet’s ability to produce insulin which controls blood sugar levels.
Diabetes can be reversed in cats; they can often go into remission with an early diagnosis and good management. But diabetes is incurable and will now be with your pet for the rest of their life. Dog diabetes is sadly irreversible.
The symptoms of cat and dog diabetes are varied and can affect many body systems, it can be linked to other indictors of poor health such as pancreatitis or cancer.
The TOP 5 Clinical SIGNS of DIABETES
- Increased drinking and thirst
- Increased urination
- Weight loss
- Increased appetite
- Cataracts and blindness
Management and care for your diabetic pet can be achieved through correct dosing of insulin, regular blood glucose checks, a fructosamine test and completion of a blood glucose curve to monitor the efficacy of the insulin dosage as prescribed by your vet.
Blood glucose levels are the main indicator of how well, or not so well your pet is metabolising insulin. Unfortunately, blood glucose can fluctuate because of stress, or part of the body’s fight or flight mechanism, so helping to keep these diabetic animals calm and keeping their stress to a minimum is crucial to create accurate glucose readings and therefore effective insulin control.
For a blood glucose curve, a venous blood sample needs to be taken by ear prick (or between the toes, or via the gum) every 1-2 hours for a period of 12 hours to produce the necessary data which is recorded on a graph.
Diabetic Clinics for your dog or cat are a supportive consultation with a vet nurse who will run through all that you need to know and what to do with your recent diabetes diagnosis for your pet.
There is a lot of information to take on board and there will potentially be quite a big shift in a pet owner’s day to day routine, to accommodate the new protocols for management. But don’t worry, diabetes can be well managed.
The pet must make regular trips to the vets for check-ups. The pet owner will need to administer insulin twice daily at mealtimes and consider finding someone who is happy to inject their pet if they want to go away. They must stick to a strict exercise regime and feed only a diet that is suitable for a pet with diabetes. But the veterinary nurse can support you with all this.
These are all big changes, but a new routine can be achieved with support from friends, family, and veterinary staff and most importantly, diabetes can be successfully controlled.
Diabetes can become an emergency quite rapidly with onset of hypoglycaemia or ketoacidosis, with signs such a vomiting, rapid breathing, sweet-smelling breath, disorientation, and seizures, please contact your vet immediately if you are worried about your cat or dog.
Through our pets app, myBuddy we always provide the best guidance we can to help you with issues that affect your pets, whether cats, dogs, rats, rabbits or reptiles. However, we would always recommend you call your vet or get in touch via the myBuddy app.