The Evolution of Diabetes Treatment CPD with Graham

Cats are not small dogs. In the same way, diabetes in cats is not the same as diabetes in dogs. While diabetes can be challenging to manage and treat well in cats or dogs, I suspect most vets would agree managing it in cats is on average more difficult. This is why we’re hoping a new treatment called Senvelgo we heard about last week at a meeting held after work at Westport Veterinary Clinic in Linlithgow, for both our staff and those from other neighbouring practices, will (not to be too dramatic) revolutionise treatment of diabetes in cats for us and more importantly you, the cats’ owners.

To try to keep a complicated story simple, a diabetic cat has too much glucose (sugar) in it’s bloodstream. This is due to a lack of insulin, a hormone normally made in the pancreas. Our current treatment (twice daily injections of insulin) aims to reduce this by making the body’s cells absorb and use more of the glucose from the blood, reducing it to more normal levels.

The new treatment works in a completely different way to reduce the blood glucose level, in that it lets more glucose leave the body via the kidneys in the urine. While this possibly sounds bad (for instance, could all the glucose be lost this way, leaving the cat with none?), there is a separate mechanism already in place in the kidney that ensures the blood glucose level can’t drop too low.

This is a major step forward from our previous insulin treatment, which could potentially cause a dangerously low blood glucose, as well as the fact the new treatment is an oral liquid (not an injection) which can be given in the food and only needs done once daily. More than this, there is now no need to continually adjust and readjust the dose as was the case with insulin injections, and we hope ongoing monitoring will also be simpler and much reduced.

While we haven’t used this new treatment ourselves yet as it’s so new, the presentation we had last week suggests it works as well as insulin injections if not better, and importantly is much much easier to use with much fewer risks or problems likely.

While we certainly don’t want any of your cats to become diabetic, we hope now if they do, we will have a much better and easier way to treat them, to keep them healthy and happy for a long time.

If you’d like further information please feel to contact us, or you can also have a look at https://cat.senvelgo.co.uk/ which is provided by the drug manufacturer for cat owners who have questions about their new product.

If you think your cat may be diabetic, please arrange an appointment and we can check them over.

We hope this new easier safer treatment will help owners who would previously have been understandably hesitant about investigating or treating diabetes in their cat to bring in their pet for a consultation so that we can help them.