What proportion of cats over the age of 9 are going to have evidence of systemic hypertension? Well, perhaps it's going to be surprising to hear that it could be up to 1 in 5 of these cats. This is one of the key reasons it's so important to measure blood pressure in our mature, senior, and super senior cats when they're presenting for health screens, annual checkups, or for other reasons.
We know that blood pressure increases with age, so the risk of hypertension is likely to be even higher as cats get older. And there are disease conditions that can contribute to the development of hypertension and are also commonly found in the ageing feline population, such as chronic kidney disease and hyperthyroidism. So measuring blood pressure in cats with these conditions is also really important.
Making a diagnosis of feline hypertension requires us to think about proactive screening and measuring blood pressure. With a little bit of practise, measuring blood pressure is very easy. It's well tolerated by most cats, takes less than 5 minutes, and should really be considered part of the routine physical examination.
Measuring blood pressure helps us to identify hypertension early, to prevent the development of target organ damage, and aids with the long-term monitoring of any anti-hypertensive treatment. My name is Roseanne. I'm professor of small animal nephrology and internal medicine.
My passion is for helping us to understand the best way to diagnose and manage patients with conditions affecting the kidney and particularly systemic hypertension. In this course, I want to give you a practical approach to diagnosing and managing feline hypertension, so that you can feel confident to manage these cases in your practise. One of the main things we know about feline hypertension is that it's commonly associated with other diseases such as hyperthyroidism or chronic kidney disease.
So later in the course, I'm going to explore the interplay between both of these conditions and how identifying hypertension can be built into their diagnosis and management. So why should we be concerned about feline hypertension? Well, the main clinical reason is that persistent high blood pressure can lead to damage to key organs.
Normally here we're talking about the eye, the kidney, the cardiovascular system, and the central nervous system, and collectively we call this target organ damage. So, having mentioned target organ damage, if I asked you what is the most common presenting sign for a cat with hypertension, what would you say? I'll come back to the answer in a minute.
One of the difficulties in answering this question is that for many cats, at least initially, there might not be any overt clinical signs that the owner has noticed. This is the same as in people and is the reason why hypertension is often referred to as the silent killer. The most striking presentation is when cats present with ocular target organ damage.
Typically here, owners will have noticed either high femur, so bleeding in the anterior chamber of the eye, or sudden onset blindness, and maybe that their cat is bumping into things. A common reason for this can be retinal detachment. But actually, more often than not, signs of systemic hypertension are not particularly obvious.
Sometimes owners may report behavioural changes such as increased vocalisation, or they might be reporting clinical signs that are associated with other underlying disease conditions. In these situations, we only identify hypertension because we make the point of measuring blood pressure. So when I asked the question, what is the most common clinical presenting sign of hypertension, the answer would be ocular target organ damage.
But actually we should be striving to encourage blood pressure measurement in cats at risk of hypertension to prevent the serious consequences like blindness from ever occurring. The current recommendations are that we should measure blood pressure in cats that are around 7 to 9 years of age as a baseline. We can then monitor as part of annual health screening, and we should measure blood pressure in any cat that has an underlying disease condition that has been associated with hypertension.
Remembering though, that it's not just at diagnosis that we need to measure blood pressure. If a cat has a condition like chronic kidney disease or hyperthyroidism and is initially normatentive, that doesn't mean that the hypertension can't develop in the future. So we should continue to monitor blood pressure as we would monitor these conditions too.
What are our takeaway messages? Well, firstly, that blood pressure increases with age, so the risk of hypertension is going to be greatest in our senior cats. It's most common for us to see hypertension associated with another disease, most commonly in the older cat, chronic kidney disease, or hyperthyroidism.
We really want to be measuring blood pressure early and screening for hypertension to prevent the consequences of target organ damage. But finally, it's good to know from the outset that there are some really effective anti-hypertensive drugs out there that we can use to treat feline hypertension. In the next video, we'll look at concurrent disease in cats that have both hypertension and chronic kidney disease.
