You Can’t Seem To Regulate Your Diabetic Cat

What do you do if you can’t seem to regulate your diabetic cat? Your cat has been diagnosed with cat diabetes and is on insulin but the cat seems to be getting worse and the blood sugar levels cannot be controlled. Here is a plea for help from a very frustrated cat owner, whose cat Tom is having major problems getting regulated:-

“I’m hoping someone can help me out. After several months, my poor cat’s diabetes is still not regulated and his quality of life has gotten really poor. He is 9 years old, 15 pounds with a large frame.

We started him on glargine (sp?) a few months ago and it didn’t help his symptoms at all. He drinks massive amounts of water all the time and always has a huge bladder because of it.

We started at 2 units of glargine, moved to 3 and then 4 a few weeks later and had no improvement. We then switched to Prozinc. We started at 2 and now we are at 6.

We started doing home glucose curves a couple weeks ago and his numbers have never been below 525. It’s usually around 600-700.

It seems like the insulin doesn’t do anything! A few other things to note… He has had urinalysis and urine cultures with nothing found. He had a test for pancreatitis which came back inconclusive, right between normal and too high (420 if I remember correctly).

At one point, we bought a brand new vial of insulin,thinking that possibly there was something wrong with it. We’ve had several fructosamin tests done and they are always way high. He has developed neuropathy really bad and barely walks around anymore.

He had an x-ray a couple days ago and nothing abnormal was found other than a huge bladder (most likely because he drinks so much and doesn’t want to go to the litterbox).

He always seems hungry and still eats well but he’s slowly losing a little weight. I’m so frustrated and sad and just hope there is someone out there that may have some advice.

Please let me know if you have any ideas of what we can do or what could be the cause of what seems to be a resistance to insulin. Thanks!”

Believe it or not there are some vets who still hardly pay any attention to diet. So the first thing to look at is what diet is this cat on. Is it a high animal protein and low carbohydrate.

I have said this many times before, a diet as close as possible to that which a cat would eat int he wild is what  you are ideally looking for.

There have been many cases where a cat owner has had problems regulating a cat who was on dry food.Once off the dry food it became a lot easier to regulate the blood sugar levels.

The next thing to look at is home blood sugar testing. It is important that you keep a check of blood sugar so that the correct dosage of insulin can be given.

This is very important because once you change diet, blood sugar levels can drop dramatically and giving a dosage of insulin that is too high can lead to  a hypoglycemic condition.

It turned out that Tom was still being fed dry food. So, if you can’t seem to regulate your diabetic cat, the first and most important thing to look at is diet.