Overcoming challenges with diagnosing and treating cat allergies

Transcript:

Andrew Rosenberg, DVM, DACVD: My name is Andrew Rosenberg, I am a veterinary dermatologist. I working with the Animal Dermatology Group as a clinical dermatologist in both the Wayne, New Jersey, and White Plains, New York, offices. I’m also the director of medical operations for the entire group, which is the largest dermatology group in the world. Additionally, I’m the president of the American College of Veterinary Dermatology, so I’m involved with the organization that board-certifies all veterinary dermatologists.

Sometimes clinicians like to imagine that cats are small dogs, right? But they’re totally different. I think dog allergies are just more straightforward than cat allergies because cats just have a mix of all of these or one of these reaction patterns, and so it can be difficult to accuralty diagnose cats. Cats can also be much pickier eaters, which makes it more difficult to do a food trial with them. Treating allergic cats is much challenging because it’s often harder for owners to medicate them than it is with dogs. So, there are a lot of pitfalls and challenges both with diagnosing and treating cats,

There could be a whole lecture for that. For treating infections, anything you can do in the office can be helpful, right? So, things like convenia injections to treat skin infections if cats have skin infections as a result of their allergies. Then, as far as you know, diagnosing accurately, that's kind of similar. If these reaction patterns are are non seasonal, you perform food trials, and you just perform food trials with food that that the cat will eat. And so it's always good to have a few different food options in your pocket. So if the cat doesn't like one you can go to another one. I tend to really like the Rayne nutrition brand of foods for novel protein diets. There are some good hydrolyzed diets out there as well

For for diagnosing environmental allergies, right? We don't use allergy tests to actually diagnose allergies, we use allergy tests to formulate immunotherapy. So to really diagnose allergies, it's really a diagnosis of rule outs. You have to make sure the cats are in good flea control, make sure that you're treating all the infections, make sure there's no fungal infection, amke sure there's no ectoparasites. So that's kind of my tip is just make sure that there's you're ruling out every other possible item before you make that diagnosis of allergy. And then it's up to the owner to be able to medicate their cat, which, which can be difficult.