Managing chronic kidney disease symptoms in cats

What options are there for controlling nausea and stimulating the appetite of a feline patient with chronic kidney disease? In an interview with dvm360 discussing his lecture “Improving the Lives of Feline Patients with Chronic Kidney Disease,” presented at the Fetch dvm360 conference in Atlantic City; Mark J. Acierno, DVM, MBA, DACVIM, professor and associate dean at Midwestern University, talked about different methods for controlling these symptoms in cats, breaking these methods down into management strategies, and different medications that can be used.

Below is a partial transcript

Mark J. Acierno, DVM, MBA, DACVIM: There's a number of different things we can do. And so part of it, you know, I like to break it down into both… management and then medications.

And so, for the management, things like small, frequent meals, rotating the diet. You know, often what happens is we will send a cat home with a particular brand of cat food, and the owner will tell me ‘well they ate it for a while, then they stopped.’ And so what I do is I send them home with a whole smörgåsbord. I just come to rotate it, right? Just keep rotating through the different ones.

Small, frequent meals. It may mean, you know this idea of feeding a meal in the morning and a meal at night may have to be changed, because when we're sick, we don't feel like eating a big meal, right? And so, cats may nosh during the day, and that may add up to a meal, and that would be great.