Hi everybody, welcome back. I’m Dr. Erica Barron, and I’m here in NOVA Cat Clinic in Arlington, Virginia. I know I usually have Ellen with me, but Ellen has pneumonia, and she has no voice. So it would not do you any good. But we had a couple of requests just for us to talk about feline allergies. So I was going to talk to you just for a couple of minutes about that. So feel free to ask any questions. If you’re online or if you want us to talk about something else about your cat, we’re happy to answer questions. But remember we’re very good at saying, “Ah, we’re not sure you might want to go to the vet to check that out.”So real fast, feline allergies don’t necessarily look like human allergies or dog allergies because they’re not dogs and they’re not humans. One of the things that I often see with feline allergies is sometimes they’ll start to sniffle just like people, but a lot of times they start having some debris in their ears, or you’ll notice some excoriations around their ears, or scratching around their ears. And sometimes they have pinpoint dermatitis. It almost looks like blackheads. It can happen in their chins. Sometimes, it happens in their ventral abdomen or their lower abdomen. And sometimes, it happens in their feet. Once in a while, when it happens in their feet, I always worry if they’re having a contact dermatitis or something to their litter. That’s not common, but it’s something to think about. So those are the things that you usually see. It can get so severe that they get secondary asthma, and they can get secondary infections because remember, whenever there is any type of inflammation, regardless of where it comes from, it can always open up the gateways to secondary infections.So let’s talk about ways we can help them clinically when we’re seeing this. So besides having contact dermatitis or something you’re allergic to, that you touch, you can be allergic to different things in the environment that cause these symptoms. But you can also be allergic to what you eat. So depending on the clinical signs, we might talk to you about doing different types of allergy testing. The allergy testing I like the most is called the HESKA panel. It’s great for environmental allergies. And this is important because most of the cats we have live in the same four walls. So if they’re allergic to something in those four walls, it’s really helpful if we can find out what it is and try to mitigate it. But just because they live in those four walls, you leave the house every day. So remember, you can bring the outside in. So if they’re allergic to certain type of tree or if they’re allergic to a certain type of weed that’s growing, or if they’re allergic to certain types of molds, there’s different things we can do to try to limit their exposures. There’s a lot of handouts we can send you if you have questions about any of these.So the HESKA panel is really good at helping us try to determine if any of that’s going on. If they do start having an intestinal stuff, sometimes that can be caused by allergies too. So we can try to sort that out by thinking about doing an abdominal ultrasound or doing endoscopies and taking little pieces out of their GI tract to try to sort out if they’re having allergic reactions to their food. One of the best ways to start sorting that, if your cat has any type of food allergies, is just to use a food trial. And what you do is this, you pick out a food they’ve never had before. It has to have all new ingredients and you give this to them. And that’s all they can for eight weeks. They can’t have any people food. They can’t have any treats. And there was a cat I saw last week that is still getting meatballs. He can’t eat that on a diet trial. It just doesn’t work. So you have to do that for eight weeks. You have to be very strict about it.And if all of their clinical signs have gone away, then you can consider adding ingredients from their previous diets. I had a friend who had a cat who was so allergic to chicken, that whenever she had any type of chicken product, her ears would start to get dermatitis and they would get red and everything. And it was so bad, that when Domino had a piece of chicken like at Yuan, he had a full flare-up by 5 o’clock. It was crazy, but poor guy. So we knew that Domino couldn’t eat chicken, which was great because he loves sardine. So he was okay with that.So once we figure out if your cat has an allergy and what they’re allergic to, some people are able just to take that out, and that’s it. Sometimes we can’t do that. Sometimes depending on where you live, it’s not possible to take out that environmental allergen. Maybe they’re allergic to the dog. There are some cats that are allergic to dogs. Maybe they’re allergic to something, like some plant that is indigenous. So your outside and you can’t get rid of it, and all this comes in. There’s a lot of things that we might not be able to get rid off. So we can consider doing allergy injections, try the same as people allergy injections. We also have an oral medication you give them. It’s every day. And then some of them have to have steroids. And some cats do great on steroids for a long time, some cats don’t.And if it’s not an allergy, we can also use something called Atopica, which is a cyclosporine. And that isn’t a steroid. It kind of acts like a steroid, but it’s not a steroid. So those will be the two options we would think about. But again, this is something you should work with your veterinarian to try to sort out if your cat is having an allergy to something because it’s something that you have to physically see and work on together. Because it can be difficult and it can be frustrating to sort out what’s going on, but they definitely will feel better when you sort it out. Well, thanks for spending this time with me today. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us. And we hope to see you again soon. Thanks. Bye.
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