Many times I define the liver as the “Waste recycling room” of animals, and of humans. But we must not forget that it is a great source of energy for the body and is continuously doing very hard work to keep harmful substances out of the body. So your main function would be filter.
In this article we want to guide you on how to take care of a cat with hepatitis so that the disease does not become a hindrance or family discomfort when living with my sick cat. What can help and what can not?
What is hepatitis in cats?
We do not want to dwell on this much because we already have a specific article that you can visit about hepatitis in cats but, to understand better the care we should, at least, define what we will face. Hepatitis is an inflammation of the liver but it does not have a single origin or cause but multiple, and some not yet fully defined.
The most common causes are:
- Hepatic lipidosis: is an accumulation of fatty tissue in the functional tissue of the liver and whose most popular cause is prolonged fasting, voluntarily or accidentally.
- Autoimmune or idiopathic hepatitis
- Feline cholangiohepatitisInflammation of the bile ducts by some bacteria that lodged in the intestine and ascended through the canaliculi to the liver, infecting it secondarily.
- Liver tumors
Diagnosis and treatments for hepatitis in cats
I will be very brief since it is not what I want to tell you in this article but I just want to encourage you that if you notice that your cat is apathetic, unwilling, with little or no appetite, already exceeding the 24 hours, go to a veterinarian for a general checkup and blood sampling, which will be our confirmation. Although the cat self-administers its food, that is to say that when it wants to eat and when it is not hungry or will touch it, we must be attentive to these long periods of inappetence since it is alarm of hepatic lipidosis.
Normally, this is accompanied by the fact that you do not want to drink water, so the condition may worsen and dehydration may cause other damages such as encephalopathy and / or irreparable damage at the central level.
El treatment will go hand in hand with care, but it will depend a lot on the state of our feline. Since we have different origins, we will not detail the treatments, so we encourage you to go to the veterinarian to make the correct diagnosis and thus face the most appropriate treatment.
Caring for a cat with hepatitis
When we return home from the vet with our little furry, the doubts and compromises begin, since it is a disease in which the veterinarian may want to keep the cat to hydrate and feed boarding school, but where it starts better, we can bring it home . The care of a cat with hepatitis that we must have is not so many but it is very important that we are attentive.
In general, cats with hepatic lipidosis do not want to eat, which we can not afford. We must place a probe, in the most extreme cases, to feed and hydrate. With the collaboration of the owners and sometimes, resorting to appetite stimulants, we managed to avoid this very traumatic and risky step for the feline.
As owners we must be patient, but insistent, trying different foods, soft feed, homemade food with what he loved to eat like meat, chicken, tuna, vegetables, fruits, etc. The goal is to eat and we must fulfill it, anyway!
What we should consider is that your liver is failing and we should give it low fat meal, because they can accumulate in your liver and continue to cause damage. The foods that we must avoid are: raw garlic and onion, chocolate, fat in the meat (for now, when it recovers are good), avocado and chocolate.
We can help, as long as the veterinarian authorizes it, with medicinal herbs that they stimulate the appetite to the cat and they do not continue damaging his liver, collaborating with his cleanliness. We can make the following options:
- Brewer’s yeast (mixed with food)
- Boldo
- Dandelion
- Artichoke extract
- Turmeric (grated or powder)
- Dried alfalfa leaves
We can also resort to homeopathy for cats consulting a veterinarian who has knowledge in order to get your basic remedy and prevent relapses in our pussycat.
Within Bach Flowers we also have some that can help us in these moments like: chicory, wild apple, honeysuckle, gorse, willow and sweet chestnut.
Last but not least, we can make you Reiki if it is that we know or ask someone to do it at a distance. This will help our little feline to feel better and accept the help we are trying to improve as soon as possible.
This article is merely informative, in .com we do not have the faculty to prescribe veterinary treatments or make any kind of diagnosis. We invite you to take your pet to the veterinarian in case of any type of condition or discomfort.
If you want to read more articles similar to Caring for a cat with hepatitis, we recommend that you enter in our section of Other health problems.