Both dogs and cats can get pancreatitis, but there are several key differences to how the disease manifests in each species. If you’re a cat owner, you should know what to look for, and what diagnostic plan your veterinarian may recommend if he suspects pancreatitis in your cat.
Pancreatitis, defined
If you memorize the fact that the suffix “itis” means “inflammation of”, you’ll have about 40% of medical terminology nailed. Pancreatitis means “inflammation of the pancreas.” But what’s a “pancreas”?
The pancreas in a cat is L-shaped, and about the length of your index finger, more or less. It sits between the small intestine and the liver, and produces digestive enzymes that flow into the small intestines and break down fats and starches. It also produces hormones important to glucose regulation in the body, but the problems that occur with pancreatitis are more associated with those digestive enzymes.
When inflammation sets in, the cells that store them rupture, spilling those enzymes right out into the abdomen, where they digest the surrounding tissue. As you might imagine, this is pretty painful.
It’s not easy to diagnose
It can be pretty difficult to definitively diagnose feline pancreatitis. In dogs we can feel pretty confident about our diagnosis with several different methods. Plus, dogs often show up extremely and violently ill with vomiting, diarrhea, and abdominal pain after polishing off the Thanksgiving turkey drippings, and that leads the way to diagnosis in a much more straightforward fashion. Dogs with pancreatitis often have enormously elevated pancreatic enzymes on routine blood work, and that alone almost closes the case.
With cats, we often see the same symptoms as we see with a lot of other diseases – occasional vomiting, occasional diarrhea, and increased lethargy. Often we have to run multiple blood tests and perform abdominal ultrasound to get to the diagnosis in cats. And in some cats, pancreatitis may still be present, and we don’t find it with those tests, either.
It may be more common than we think
In one study of 115 cats that were necropsied (that’s the animal equivalent of autopsied) that died of various causes, 67% had pancreatic lesions that were consistent with pancreatitis.
Sometimes people label their cats as “vomiters”; that is to say the cat is essentially normal but it vomits occasionally. Most of the time even routine lab work is normal on these cats, and since pancreatitis is an elusive diagnosis, it’s possible that these cats are vomiting because they actually have mild pancreatitis.
Pancreatitis hangs out with a rough crowd
Most of the time – actually 66% of the time, to be exact, according to one study – cats that have pancreatitis have another chronic disease to go along with it. Because the pancreatic enzymes are spewing into the abdomen, causing digestion of everything around them, they cause extensive scarring of structures like the common bile duct, small intestine, and the liver, and this contributes to the problem.
It becomes a chicken-and-the-egg kind of thing, because we suspect that these other diseases – things like diabetes, cholangiohepatitis, and triaditis – may predispose the cat to the development of pancreatitis, and vice-versa.
How do you keep your cat from getting pancreatitis?
I wish I knew. In dogs, certain drugs and extremely fatty diets can cause pancreatitis, but not so in cats. Frequent vomiting may predispose the cat to the development of pancreatitis, so if there are poorly controlled conditions like inflammatory bowel disease, pancreatitis may follow on.
Other conditions that have been identified as possible risk factors include trauma (getting hit by a car or falling), certain toxins, and some infectious diseases.
What’s the prognosis?
Cats can die from pancreatitis, and many require in-patient hospital care with IV fluids, drugs to control nausea, stomach acid production, and pain. But many cats with mild chronic pancreatitis do well with careful management, so if your cat experiences mild or severe gastrointestinal distress, see your vet to determine if pancreatitis is a possibility.