Approaching unusual feline skin disease cases

Earlier this spring, Joya Griffin, DVM, DACVD, practicing dermatologist with the Animal Dermatology Group in Louisville, Kentucky, and star of the National Geographic Wild television series Pop Goes the Vet with Dr Joya sat down with dvm360 to discuss her lecture Kitty Conundrums: Dermatologic CATastrophies, presented at the Fetch dvm360 conference in North Carolina, Charlotte.

In this video, Griffin shares how she approaches unusual skin disease cases in cats. She highlights the importance of prioritizing advanced diagnostics, such as skin biopsies, to avoid misdiagnosis. Although cats are often associated with itchiness, Griffin explains that clinical signs can point to more serious conditions, such as autoimmune diseases or paraneoplastic syndromes related to internal diseases or cancer.

According to Griffin, disease have different patterns and presentations. Yet, feline patients with severe diseases are often misdiagnosed with allergic disease.

Below is the transcript:

Joya Griffin, DVM, DACVD: Yeah, so I think that cats are often forgotten, and in veterinary medicine in general and definitely in dermatology there's a lot that we still don't know. But whenever I'm presented with an unusual cat case, I really hone in and I try to prioritize advanced diagnostics like biopsy because I think we often think of cats as just being itchy cats, but there are some clinical presentations that they will come in with that are related to autoimmune disease, sometimes paraneoplastic syndromes where there's internal disease or cancer somewhere that's causing lesions on the skin. And I think those cases look very different. Dermatology is a visually distinctive disease, and after a while, you start to recognize these patterns of lesions. And whenever something looks a little scary or very unusual, I think you always have the right to biopsy, because some of these cats have very severe diseases that are often misdiagnosed for allergic disease.

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