? (New Member 4/3/24) Experience with diarrhea & GI issues in diabetic cats?

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carbie

carbie

Member Since 2024
Hi all! New here as far as posting goes, but I've referenced FDMB multiple times ever since my cat's diabetes diagnosis (long enough ago now that I honestly can't remember how long it's been-- just that it's been more than a year now.)

I decided to make an account and post today to see if anyone else has experienced their diabetic cat having accompanying GI issues. It's been a recurring issue for my boy ever since he developed diabetes, mostly showing as chronic diarrhea of varying degrees and trouble/straining while defecating. It doesn't really seem to matter what food he's eating, either.

I haven't had time to fill out any sheet or anything, but here is some basic info about him, his diet, and his medical history:
  • 8-10 years old (was a stray, so not sure of exact age)
  • Chronic nasal/respiratory infections (especially now that he can't take steroids for it)
  • Currently eating Friskies pate
  • Gets 1 unit of prozinc insulin twice daily
It should also be mentioned that his blood sugar has historically been... Very unpredictable, which has caused a number of low blood sugar episodes since his diagnosis, especially before I began at home testing. It often seems that he is going into remission with his sugar too low to be given insulin, only for him to come right back out of it within the week or two after I've stopped giving it to him. Long story short: regulating his sugar has been a time and a half to put it mildly.

(I'll get back to the main point of the thread now, but I figured this could be useful information for anyone who is trying to answer!)

While he's always had some trouble with his poops during all of this, what's made me decide to write this post now is that he's had some especially bad/runny diarrhea the last week or so, now lately with accompanying straining and what seems to be cramps or pain. Around the same time it started, I had started giving him the Friskies pate again to help him gain back some weight he lost after a prolonged period of high sugar that we were having trouble getting back down, and I sadly made the mistake of not reintroducing it slowly (yes, I do feel very silly and bad about forgetting...) So, I originally thought it was just from the sudden change in food... But now that it seems painful and still hasn't quit, I have him scheduled for a vet visit tomorrow morning.

What I'm looking for mostly is if anybody else has had experience with GI issues in their diabetic cats, and if so, what I should make sure to ask the vet about when I take him, along with what I could potentially expect from the visit. If there are any issues diabetic cats are predisposed to that could be causing this, I'd really like to make sure they're tested for. And of course, the two things could be unrelated... But it's always good to be pre-informed when heading into the vet in my experience.

So sorry about how long this is... I really tried to keep it short, but I'd hate to leave any important information out :confused: Even if it's not currently an emergency, I'm still worried about the little guy.

(Small additional note: despite his current diarrhea, he has actually started gaining back some weight and is no more lethargic or unresponsive than normal either, which is why I'm comfortable taking him tomorrow morning rather than treating it as an emergency at the moment)
 
My diabetic cat also has IBD. The IBD came first. He was taking a steroid to control IBD symptoms and that eventually caused the diabetes. He is now taking a different steroid which is supposed to not affect blood glucose levels too much.

There's in depth info on IBD here: https://www.ibdkitties.net/ There isn't a test to diagnose IBD. Vets make a diagnosis based on symptoms. An endoscopy can be helpful to determine if there is thickening of the intestinal walls.

Food allergy / sensitivity can cause GI issues. Protein is often the culprit. You can try to rule that out by feeding only a novel single protein food for a couple of weeks to see if that helps. Rabbit is a common novel protein to try. Carrageenan, a common thickener in pet food, is thought to cause GI upset.

Adding a probiotic and digestive enzymes to the food may be helpful.
 
Hi and welcome to the forum..
When you have time it would be very helpful if you could set up the spreadsheet and signature so we can help you more fully. We need those to be able to do so. If you could add a couple of weeks of back dated BG data as well that would be great.
HERE is the link for setting up both. If you have any trouble setting up the SS let me know.
HELP US HELP YOU

In relation to the diarrhoea…have you been giving any probiotics at all. S Boularddi is excellent for loose poops.
One of my non diabetic kitties had painful and loose poops for ages and I eventually tried a product that had several probiotics in it. The name escapes me but @tiffmaxee will know as she recommended it. It has made a massive difference to my kitty who now has normal poops.

Do you decrease the dose of Prozinc down from 1 unit or do you just stop it when he drops low?
 
squeem3 said:
My diabetic cat also has IBD. The IBD came first. He was taking a steroid to control IBD symptoms and that eventually caused the diabetes. He is now taking a different steroid which is supposed to not affect blood glucose levels too much.

There's in depth info on IBD here: https://www.ibdkitties.net/ There isn't a test to diagnose IBD. Vets make a diagnosis based on symptoms. An endoscopy can be helpful to determine if there is thickening of the intestinal walls.

Food allergy / sensitivity can cause GI issues. Protein is often the culprit. You can try to rule that out by feeding only a novel single protein food for a couple of weeks to see if that helps. Rabbit is a common novel protein to try. Carrageenan, a common thickener in pet food, is thought to cause GI upset.

Adding a probiotic and digestive enzymes to the food may be helpful.
Click to expand...

I knew about IBS, but I've never actually heard of IBD before; thank you for the information! I'll definitely bring it up with the vet as a possibility to consider, just in case. I'll also look into a single protein food to try. The main problem with him is that he's quite picky with his food, so it's sometimes a struggle actually getting him to eat something new.

Bron and Sheba (GA) said:
Hi and welcome to the forum..
When you have time it would be very helpful if you could set up the spreadsheet and signature so we can help you more fully. We need those to be able to do so. If you could add a couple of weeks of back dated BG data as well that would be great.
HERE is the link for setting up both. If you have any trouble setting up the SS let me know.
HELP US HELP YOU

In relation to the diarrhoea…have you been giving any probiotics at all. S Boularddi is excellent for loose poops.
One of my non diabetic kitties had painful and loose poops for ages and I eventually tried a product that had several probiotics in it. The name escapes me but @tiffmaxee will know as she recommended it. It has made a massive difference to my kitty who now has normal poops.

Do you decrease the dose of Prozinc down from 1 unit or do you just stop it when he drops low?
Click to expand...

Thank you for the link! I don't know if I'll have time to get the spreadsheet set up before tomorrow, but I'll definitely get my signature together. Despite how long he's been diagnosed, I've only somewhat recently finally been properly informed on just how many times I should be checking his sugar after reading more in the forums here... I used to think only once before his shot was enough, and the vet had never informed me otherwise :( So we're still working on getting a proper long log of his glucose levels; I think using this sheet will definitely help and make it feel less overwhelming, at least. It's hard to not feel a bit guilty knowing that some of his low blood sugar episodes probably could have been avoided if I was doing a better job with his home testing.

With the Prozinc, I before had just stopped it entirely when he had a low blood sugar episode, mostly out of anxiety and paranoia around it. It's always quite scary. The last time it happened, I only skipped the next day's shots to monitor his sugar and see where he was at with food before starting it again. I'm honestly not sure what's best practice in this case.

As for the probiotics, I've started giving him Purina FortiFlora mixed into his food once a day. It's been about a week of it now and no real visible change yet, but I know sometimes it can take longer to see a difference.
 
squeem3 said:
FortiFlora isn't a very good probiotic. The CFU count is too low and there's just one bacteria strain. The only thing FortiFlora is good for is to entice cats to eat because of the yummy animal digest.

There are better probiotics out there. Human ones can even be used. Here's some info: https://www.rawfeedingforibdcats.org/probiotics-for-cats---why-and-which-ones.html
Click to expand...

Oh, wow, I had no idea about all of that! I'd just seen a lot of people saying it worked for them and decided to try it, so this is really good to know. Thank you!!
 
The combination of probiotics I was trying to think of is Visbiome. Highly recommend it. Once you get the SS set up with some data we can help you with dosing.
 
Bron and Sheba (GA) said:
The combination of probiotics I was trying to think of is Visbiome. Highly recommend it. Once you get the SS set up with some data we can help you with dosing.
Click to expand...

Thank you! I'll definitely look into it. Do you remember if you used the packets or capsules when you used it?

And for the spreadsheet, after looking back at my readings on the AlphaTrak, I really feel like I have not done a good job at consistency with his testing at all, and a lot of it really isn't very helpful... So I'm going to spend the next week tracking his numbers through the day, including a proper curve at least once, maybe twice. I work from home, so on days I don't have any other running to do, I'm able to do the testing pretty much whenever. Would it be best to put my spreadsheet up after I have the full week filled out, or should I just go ahead and do it for people to look at as it gets filled out even with little to no info at the start? I have some troubles with routine and the like sometimes due to ADHD, and I'm hoping that actually using the forum here will help me hold myself accountable for getting all of the readings that I should (It gets a bit hard/overwhelming when I'm the only person trying to keep on top of things...)



And a small update now that I've gotten home from the vet: they were very confident that it's nothing serious due to the fact he's gaining weight instead of losing it and hasn't been throwing up or losing appetite at all. They gave me metronidazole to give him twice a day until his stool starts firming up, and told me to bring him back if it doesn't start improving soon. In the meantime, I'm going to look for some novel protein foods to try giving him in case it's part of the problem (which given the onset around the time of switching his food, I think it probably is), and will definitely pick a better probiotic out for him. Due to money constraints, I'm thinking I'll start with the Saccharomyces Boulardii Probiotics + MOS from Jarrow since it's a bit cheaper, and then move to trying the Visbiome if that doesn't do much. He's been put on long rounds of antibiotics quite frequently over the years due to his chronic nasal/respiratory infections, so I think in retrospect that might have caused a lot of his stomach issues. Of course, if the medicine and probiotic combo don't seem to help at all, I'll also just take him back to run proper tests for something more serious than an upset stomach.

Thank you guys for the help and info! I really wish I had started using the forum sooner than this. I'd only ever glanced through threads sometimes when they came up in my Google searches when I couldn't contact my vet, and now I'm thinking the last year or two would have been a lot easier on both of us if I'd done better reading... But I'm just going to try to do my best with all of this new info now instead of beating myself up too hard for not doing a better job before.
 
I would get the spreadsheet set up now so we can see it as you go along. I would put some of your previous data into it. It doesn’t matter if it isn’t perfect. We are ok with that. All data is helpful.
Re visbiome … I live in Australia so could not get visbiome but I looked up the ingredients and found one that had the same ingredients so got that. It is in powder form which I mix with the food each day.
S boulardii is great for diarrhoea ( I used it for ages for my kitty) but it was the visbiome (equivalent in my case) that made the biggest difference. Good idea to see if the s boulardii stops the diarrhoea. You were given a detailed link to IBD in post 2 above and that has how to use s boulardii in diarrhoea.
If your kitty has had several courses of antibiotics I think the visbiome will help a lot.
 
Another thought is to consider a raw diet with novel proteins. The link to the information on probiotics is from a website -- Raw Feeding for IBD Cats. They also. have a Facebook page. My cats do great on a raw diet. There are pre-mixes that you can buy (e.g., FoodFurLife) that you add to the raw food to make it nutritionally complete.
 
If making raw from scratch isn't an option, there are commercially available novel raw cat foods you can try. My diabetic / IBD cat eats Vital Essentials freeze dried rabbit. There is a frozen version which my cat started with but then developed an allergy to the goat milk in the food :rolleyes: The frozen raw no longer contains goat milk.
 
Thank you all! I'm definitely considering switching to raw at some point, especially since it seems cheaper in the long run. I think I'm just a bit worried about making the jump because of his rather weak immune system- makes me scared he'd not be able to digest it like he's supposed to, or that there's even less room for error on my part in terms of preparation. I'm at least planning to switch him to Fancy Feast in the meantime.

I've also been a bit busy the last few days, but have been keeping up with his blood sugar measurements so that I can sit down and transfer them all to his sheet at the beginning of the week. Would it be best to make a new post in the Prozinc specific forum once I have that all set up to get eyes on it?

Thank you all again!
 
Pre and pro biotics and digestive enzymes can be helpful.

Homemade raw is definitely cheaper and easy to prepare if you use a pre-mix (the powder that contains all of the essential supplements). For a single batch of food, the typical instructions are something like put 2 lbs of cubed or diced raw meat of your choice into a bowl, add 1/2 cup of the pre-mix powder, add 1 cup of water. Stir together until well combined. Portion out the food (single serving sizes, daily portions sizes, whatever works for you) and freeze.

Commercial raw is an option but pricier. A bag of the freeze dried raw I feed is $28 and doesn't last more than a week :eek: But some cats accept commercial freeze dried and air dried raw more readily than frozen or homemade raw.

Oh, cooked food is an option and might be better for immune compromised cats. Many of the pre-mixes available such as EZComplete can be used with cooked meat as well. I'm not exactly sure how you cook the meat (boil? Poach? Bake?). The product web site should have more info.

You can post over in the ProZinc forum once you get your spreadsheet started. You're always welcome to post in Health :)
 
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