Clinical and nutritional follow-up of cats with chronic kidney disease fed with a renal prescription diet

ABSTRACT

Background: The use of prescription diets for cats with chronic kidney disease (CKD) is one of the main managementapproach of this disease in cats, and is considered a renoprotective strategy that may promote increased survival and/orimprove quality of life, according to the stage of CKD. Besides that, nutritional assessment is important to monitor themaintenance of quality of life of the patients and their response to disease, especially those with chronic conditions. Theaim of this study was to follow the clinical and nutritional status of cats with chronic kidney disease (CKD) IRIS stagesII, III and IV fed with a renal prescription diet, followed for 12 months.Materials, Methods & Results: Patients were fed exclusively with a dry renal prescription diet and medications for themanagement of CKD were prescribed when needed. Exclusion criteria were cats that already received a renal prescriptiondiet or medications for the treatment of CKD. Cats were evaluated every 2 months, considering body weight (BW), bodycondition score (BCS), muscle mass score (MMS), clinical and laboratory parameters. In all assessments, a complete bloodcount and biochemistry were performed by conventional methods with the patient fasted for 12 h. In addition, urinalysis,urine proteincreatinine ratio (UPC) and urine culture were performed from a urine sample collected by cystocentesis.The quantitative variables were tested for their stability on consecutive assessments using the non-parametric Friedmantest, and did not present significant variation during follow-up, except for systolic blood pressure (SBP). Eight cats witha diagnosis of CKD were included in the study and 6 of them remained in the same CKD stage during follow-up. On catdied due to an unrelated CKD cause. Regarding nutritional assessment, 5 of 7 cats maintained BW during the 12 months...