Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Welcome to the official podcast of the World Small Animal Veterinary Association, where we bring you conversations with leading veterinary experts from around the globe. Each season spotlights one WSAVA committee, sharing their knowledge, research, and insights through short, accessible interviews.
Every fortnight, we speak with two experts on a shared theme, offering concise, engaging discussions designed to spark curiosity and guide you toward WSAVA’s extensive library of educational resources, webinars, and events. Hosted by WSAVA President Jim Berry, the podcast delivers focused conversations that connect you with the latest thinking in small animal medicine worldwide.
You can find more educational resources from WSAVA here: https://wsava.org/education/
Peter Higgins: Hello and welcome to this very special WSAVA podcast. Just to introduce myself, my name is Dr Peter Higgins, and I have the absolute honour to chair the Global Nutrition Committee for the WSAVA and today we have a very interesting podcast and the person we're gonna talk to is Dr Tanya Schoeman and Tanya is a veterinary specialist physician, but also a Royal Canin feline health specialist and today we're gonna talk about a couple of things. We're gonna talk about ageing in dogs and cats, from the point of view of ageing itself, but also from the point of view of, obviously given these are nutrition podcasts, how ageing and nutrition works together and the preventative role that it can have.
Peter Higgins: So I think it's gonna be a really interesting one and I'm looking forward to our discussion. So first of all, welcome Tanya. Welcome to the podcast.
Tanya Schoeman: Thank you Peter. That's such a privilege to be here and I look forward to our conversation.
Peter Higgins: Okay. Let's get into it then. So when we talk about healthy ageing, which is a term that's used a lot, what does that actually mean from a point of view of veterinary practice? The definitions evolved over the years, hasn't it? From a veterinary practitioner, GP vet or vet tech or vet nurse,
Peter Higgins: What does healthy ageing mean?
Tanya Schoeman: Absolutely Peter. And I think the most important point for me is, just like humans, we've now done enough research in gerontology in dogs and cats to be able to say ageing is not a disease and I think that is an incredibly important point to remember and ageing itself is a natural biological process where as pets grow older there's gradual changes that occur inside their bodies on cellular levels and these gradual biological changes then lead to decline in cellular function and resilience over time. And this starts happening, a animal is born and it builds up functional resilience and then it reaches a plateau and when an animal reaches about adults or midlife, that starts gradually declining and this is long before outwardly signs of ageing are visible.
Peter Higgins: Okay. Just one point that with that then, I suppose it's fair to say that, and I'm a practising vet too, right? So it's probably fair to say that many practising vets and vet techs and nurses would see ageing as something to manage after signs appear, after you start to see problems.
Peter Higgins: But the science is now saying ageing itself can either be modified or even slowed down. How is all that changing the conversation in veterinary medicine?
Tanya Schoeman: It's actually really exciting Peter because it changes our conversation from a almost inevitable doom to something which is hopeful and manageable.
Peter Higgins: Manageable?
Tanya Schoeman: It is and it's modifiable as well. And there are lots of correlations with human medicine, but I would say the one big change in the way we look at ageing is classically the way we would say how do I let my dog or cat live longer?
Tanya Schoeman: So the focus was on lifespan and the ultimate goal was to say I want it to live as long as possible and what the narrative is changing to now is, how can we keep their health span as long as possible? And this literally means how can we keep a dog or a cat in a healthy, vibrant, active, functional, resilience state where they have a good quality of life and keep that quality of life before age-related decline sets in at a later stage. So we are saying health span rather than lifespan and this we can start influencing early. We know from what we learn from human that a lot of things influence this and things like genetics, lifestyle, healthcare, nutrition, activity levels, and most of those principles are applied to dogs and cats as well in the ageing process.
Peter Higgins: So before we talk about nutrition, let's keep talking about ageing 'cause it's really interesting and I agree with you completely. It should be about quality of life. It's not
Peter Higgins: just my dog is now 18 years of age, but it can't move. I don't think anyone really wants that.
Peter Higgins: So it is about quality of life. So let's just before we talk about nutrition itself, from the point of view of someone in veterinary practice, what are some of the earliest and maybe even signs that are overlooked a bit from pets that may not be ageing as healthy as they possibly should be?
Peter Higgins: What are the early signs of that?
Tanya Schoeman: The bottom line here is they are so subtle, and in a dog or a cat that is ageing maybe prematurely or maybe at the right age, the signs are not gonna hit you bang in the face. And you really need to be almost a detective when you speak to your pet owners about that to really try and figure out what is happening. You really need to dig in and ask the right questions because it's usually a small, subtle behavioural changes or lifestyle changes. So it might be that the dog is slowing down, doesn't wanna go for a walk as much. It might be that the cat is suddenly sleeping on the floor instead of on the bed which inherently means there's some osteoarthritis and disease going on inside, but it translates as, oh, suddenly my cat sleeps on the floor. And if you don't think about it, things like climbing stairs, dogs that dissociate, dogs that don't wanna interact anymore and very often pet owners interpret this as, oh, it's okay, it's normal, it's ageing.
Tanya Schoeman: My dog or cat's just getting older. And I think that is the absolute message today is ageing isn't a disease and none of those changes are normal. They're all indicators of something else that's going on that we could possibly influence if we catch them quickly enough.
Peter Higgins: Yeah, it's interesting what you say about stairs. My own dog is 12 years old and we live in a two story house and he's now just starting not to like the stairs very
Peter Higgins: much, I'm looking at that about ways to intervene early which is a good segue actually. If we are gonna intervene, what sorts of interventions can we do? And I know we haven't actually got to nutrition yet, but we will. What sort of interventions can we do and what's that look like in veterinary practice for small
Peter Higgins: interventions early, not waiting for signs?
Tanya Schoeman: Yes, exactly and I think to me the answer is getting proper preventive healthcare in place and to say when an animal reaches midlife, let's start putting these yearly health checks in place. And for every individual dog or cat, start monitoring what is normal for that dog or cat.
Tanya Schoeman: So get them in once a year and start saying, let's do a panel of blood tests. Let's do urine tests. Let's do blood pressure. Let's look at their body weight. Let's look at their body condition score, muscle condition score. Their dental health. And really every year build a database of what is normal for that individual.
Tanya Schoeman: And when there are subtle changes that start happening, we would be able to pick that up and say, oh wow, this cat's kidneys, the creatinine levels are still within normal, but it's starting to slowly creep up. So for this individual cat, this could be an indicator of early renal disease and we can then start the right nutrition or management practises. So I think the biggest thing is a mindset change for our pet owners to know that we are investing in life and not waiting for age. We are investing in healthy life going forward and just that mindset of let's get things going so that we are on top of it.
Peter Higgins: So I guess the two messages so far, just before we do move on, is that ageing is not a disease and it's not normal. In a way, I suppose it is normal, but, signs of ageing is not necessarily normal. But also early intervention is something we should consider more than perhaps what we are at the moment.
Tanya Schoeman: Absolutely, absolutely.
Peter Higgins: Alright, so let's talk about nutrition. I think to be fair, I think the profession is good at managing disease later in life after signs are shown, but do we need to start to think differently about the role of nutrition and look about making changes earlier in the ageing process than what we are doing now?
Tanya Schoeman: Well, I would think it's a part of a generalised approach and Peter, my answer really is that that nutrition journey starts when animal is born and we know from all the start of life work that what an animal eats in its first thousand days is going to determine its health going forward.
Tanya Schoeman: It's DOHaD principle, but when we get to middle age, I would say the most important, or let's look at factors that we can look at to influence aging. Nutrition is one of them, activity is another, medical health and then a fourth one is medication, which we're not gonna go into too much detail, but those are the four pillars that we could say, how can we positively influence the ageing trajectory of this animal? And when we stop at nutrition, the first thing I wanna say is the most modifiable factor in the trajectory of ageing is body weight and we know that body weight maintenance and prevention of obesity, or correction of obesity has a significant role in how the disease process plays out and how the ageing process looks for an individual, an animal. So I'm not gonna sit here and say, you need to feed this specific diet and this is gonna save your dog or cats future life. It really needs to come down to feeding a complete and balanced diet, containing all the right nutrients for the life stage, but also to look at body weight management, very importantly. And then activity levels and also dogs and cats are holistic creatures. So on the one hand we talk about nutrition and activity, but we also have to keep in mind that other things that are going to play a role in the nutrition as well as the ageing process are things like the human all bond, the social interaction with the parent. Mealtime feeding could be a massive indicator of health going forward. For the owner to check, is he eating? Is he able to eat? Is it starting to hurt when he eats? And then also activity levels and keeping their agency and their emotional health by mental stimulation, things like chew toys and things. So it's not only about what you eat, but also how you eat and how much you eat.
Peter Higgins: Yeah, certainly I think obesity, which we won't go into too much now because we've covered that in other podcasts actually. But it is just one of those problems that it, that could be covered everywhere, isn't it? And it's not just the veterinary profession, it's owners who have a, they have an expectation that it's a little bit overweight, but that's okay, whereas it's not okay.
Tanya Schoeman: And I think from a, from an ageing perspective, the thing that is, to me, the most significant, and I often discuss this with owners as well, 'cause it's so telling is the study that was done on Labrador and is the famous Labrador study that was done over two decades, where they had 24 Labradors, which were fed at daily caloric requirement
Tanya Schoeman: and then they had 24 Labradors that were fed a 25% reduction in daily calories, so 25% less of what they thought they should be getting per day. And they followed these dogs over 20 years. The cohort that received the caloric restriction lived on average 1.8 years longer, and also age-related diseases such as osteoarthritis and all those cognitive decline, all of those diseases took much longer to appear in the cohort that had the chloric restriction. So I would say, and we know this from human medicine as well, but certainly body weight management is by far the most modifiable factor that we can do to make sure that they age healthily and the health spend stays as long as possible.
Peter Higgins: So we, you're right, we don't wanna talk about specific diets in this particular podcast, but in general, what sorts of things are we looking at with older animals? So better quality protein, for example, is that a general direction that we should be looking at as an animal ages?
Tanya Schoeman: So my answer is yes and no because, or yes, and we don't know actually. Because when you look at the PDF on AAFCO, if you look at their requirements for nutritional standards, they have nutritional standards for growth, reproduction, and adult life stages. None of the governing bodies actually have preset standards for senior animals.
Tanya Schoeman: The scientific answer is we don't have nutritional standards for senior animals yet. That being said, when age-related diseases step in, we obviously know that things like, say for example, kidney disease, we know and we have absolute proof that a kidney diet with a reduced or high quality protein, reduced phosphorus levels, adapters, calcium phosphorus ratio, that can prolong that cat's course of life. So the answer again to me is monitor them and adapt the diet according to the earlier signs that they start showing.
Peter Higgins: Okay, it's interesting because the reason why I ask that is, there's a lot of urban myths, isn't there? There's a lot of anecdotal stories and I guess what we're trying to do, both the World Small Animal Veterinary Association and this series of podcasts is looking at evidence based. We wanna stay evidence-based with all this and you've said that very well.
Peter Higgins: So look, I think we'll move on to our feline friends. I know you're a feline specialist. So is there anything in particular with cats that we need? And they can be difficult, can't they, cats?
Peter Higgins: Because they tend to hide their signs. They're good at hiding that they're not well or they're ageing. Are there any special areas that vets should be looking at with routine consultations?
Tanya Schoeman: Absolutely. And even more so with cats, the signs are so subtle. So remember, cats are solitary creatures and they are hunting creatures. So their nature is to look strong outwardly and to self-protect. So they don't really want to show weakness and again, this is very behavioural and owners, there's no way that I could do a senior cat consult if I don't have a owner giving me a proper history, so from examining the cat on the table, I would be able to tell you what blood pressure is but I won't be able to tell you anything about its osteoarticular difficulties or its cognitive decline or its mental and emotional state. So let's take osteoarthritis, because we know that more than 80% of cats older than 12 have a degree of osteoarthritis. What is the cat going to do and what are the questions we need to ask our owners? It needs to be things like is he still sleeping on the bed with you? Oh no, he is sleeping on the floor.
Tanya Schoeman: I'm sure he has a window that he would like to look out of. Is he still looking out of his favourite window and where are the food bowls? Are they still on the table and is he eating as much as he used to be or, how about stairs? Are you seeing that he's starting to take a bit of strain with climbing the stairs?
Tanya Schoeman: Things like eating less because there might be osteoarthritis of the jaw or of the neck, them not bending down and a very common one in older cats is, and bless them because people really think they're getting grumpy but you know exactly what I'm talking about,
Tanya Schoeman: there's a cat's lying, it lying flat and you go and you stroke them and after two or three strokes over its back, it turns around and it bites you. And very often, that's not just a cat that's naughty or nasty. That's a cat that's hurting in his back and he doesn't know how to tell you.
Tanya Schoeman: So he turns around and he tries to self protect. It could be that when he's sleeping, he's not curled up as comfortably anymore. He's, he tends to stretch out more and life flat more on ground surface. So that's just osteoarthritis. Then we can talk about cognitive decline, which is extremely prevalent in all dogs and cats and the questions we need to ask our pet parents are things like, do they seem disorientated? Cats often start vocalising at night and peter, my own 11-year-old cat started doing this and I was busy preparing a lecture and suddenly it hits me between the eyes and I was thinking my own cat has suddenly started vocalising, Yeah.
Tanya Schoeman: Vocalising and sounding anxious. And I thought, what's your problem? But now I realise she's, there's this a degree of cognitive decline. Dogs might look disorientated that it might not recognise their owners and another big thing with cats is litter tray behaviour. They might start missing the litter tray or going in inappropriate places and that could be a combination of cognitive decline as well as arthritis because it could mean that literally, that cat is getting too sore to climb over a high walled litter tray. I might need some environmental adaptions to make that life more comfortable.
Peter Higgins: Yeah. And you've answered another question that I was gonna ask separately, but I don't think I need to now. I was gonna say, how does a veterinary profession talk to their clients, talk to pet owners, without making the owner feel guilty or scared or anything like that. But you've already answered that with some of those things you just said about talking about the litter tray and talking about all those things that, that's the way to do it.
Peter Higgins: It's not too directed at the client. It's to say, your cat's acting that way not because it's grumpy, it's because it's sore leg or whatever.
Tanya Schoeman: Yeah. And I think, I think really important for us is to never sound like we are judging or blaming. We should be empowering our pet owners and they shouldn't feel guilty or blamed and very interestingly, about two months ago, Royal Canin did a pet owners survey study, and they looked at 18,000 pet owners across 18 countries, or 19,000, where they asked them about their habits and their ageing pet habits and the results were really scary and empowering for us to see and what we saw from that is that there are two big groups of thinking. And in the first place, there's really an action gap with pet owner knowledge. So they really don't know that their animals are ageing and they don't know what the subtle signs are.
Tanya Schoeman: And in this study, it literally showed that 40%, 44% of the owners only ever think about ageing once they've started seeing visible signs, that's the first time they start thinking about it. 38% of them believed nothing can be done in any way and 31% of them said, oh no, that I don't have to take my cat or dog to the vet because it seems fine.
Tanya Schoeman: So it's really a knowledge gap and a action gap to try and get them in earlier. And then the other big thing that came from the study, what we saw was the emotional aspect around ageing. 55% of the owners said, I don't even wanna talk about it, this is too sad. And 30, 38% of them said I don't think I, we, could do anything about it. And over 50% of them said, I'm scared that I'm not gonna be able to look after it properly when it gets old. And I think if we put it in perspective now, if we look at a cat or a small dog, we say at birth they're a puppy. Then they become adults, and then they become mature at seven.
Tanya Schoeman: Now these dogs and cats can easily live to 17, 18, which if we put this in the lifeline perspective, it means this animal is spending most of its life in a mature and ageing stage. So this is not the beginning of the end. It's the next phase and almost like midlife and people, we wanna say, let's celebrate this.
Tanya Schoeman: Let's celebrate the fact that we are now preparing to keep them in their prime. What can we do to keep our pets in their prime for as long as possible?
Peter Higgins: I really like that. That's a great way to, to put it. Let's celebrate it. That's a really good one. I'm gonna use that myself. I like that. Just, let's celebrate it, because it is part of the journey. It's something that we need to communicate as profession a bit better.
Tanya Schoeman: Absolutely and Peter, what's very interesting is in this survey we also found that over 50% of our owners celebrate their pet's birthdays. We know that 75% of them buy gifts and we know that almost a third of them spend more on their gifts for their pets than they do on their own children. So what I'm saying is, let's use that birthday. Let's be as a practising veterinarian, let's send them a email to say 'Gatsby is turning seven.
Tanya Schoeman: Fantastic. Let's celebrate her birthday. I've got something here for her to a little gift and while we're at it, why don't you bring her in for a yearly health check and we make sure that she's still in her prime.' But just turn that conversation positively and help empower our veterinary professionals to have that conversation in a very positive, encouraging way.
Peter Higgins: Alright, now Tanya, I'm going, we've been talking about the situation as it is now. I'm gonna get you to pull your crystal ball out. Looking at the developments in nutrition and also ageing science for that matter. What are you most excited about over the next five or even 10 years?
Tanya Schoeman: Ooh, ooh. I love this question and there are actually quite a few things. I think first of all is the fact that gerontology in dogs and cats, the research is really coming together and we have the dog ageing project in The States where they have a cohort of thousands of dogs where they're using them as a model of ageing in humans because they follow the same process.
Tanya Schoeman: So a growing understanding of the biology of ageing and where we can intervene and in which stages, what can we do about the inflammation? What can we do about the metabolic changes? What can we do about the microbiome changes? We don't know all of that yet, but we know that we do have a role to play.
Tanya Schoeman: And then another thing, and I dunno if you know this, and you're gonna like it because it has to do with nutrition, is as far as osteoarthritis goes there's been publications in the last year or two which showed that a diet which was enriched with Omega-3 fatty acids, but with predominantly DHA compared to EPA, combined with
Tanya Schoeman: Things like curcumin and things like hydrolysed collagen. This was a diet that was tested in cats, and later studied in dogs, with existing moderate to severe osteoarthritis and these cats showed incredible improvement and the, result of the study was that we can actually now treat osteoarthritis in cats and dogs with nutrition alone.
Tanya Schoeman: And this cat study even went one step further and they compared the cats on the diet to cats on Meloxicam. In many cases, especially because Meloxicam cats had lots of side effects, of course, but in many cases, the diet showed more consistent results, and these were cats that had moderate to severe osteoarthritis.
Tanya Schoeman: So I'm extremely excited to know that osteoarthritis in the near future will be able to look at nutritionally instead of all these drugs, all these expensive drugs, or at least ameliorate the effect that we have to achieve with drugs. I think I'm also very excited about the fact that we'll be able to individualise our healthcare more. If we really have baselines and trends for each individual animal, we'll be able to see what happens in that animal's specific body. And then things like better tools, there's frailty scores coming out. You have chronological age, which means how many years have you lived? And this is exactly how old am I, but then the body has a biological age, which really says, at what rate are these cells declining and this gives us a better indication of where they are physiologically.
Tanya Schoeman: We all know this, a 50-year-old person can be really slow and walking with their device or they could be running up a mountain still, and we now know that this is true for dogs and cats as well, and there's a lot of research that's being done to bring out epigenetic clocks to try and predict biological age, which will help us as us to better manage the ageing process as well.
Peter Higgins: Yeah, I'm excited about the next five years, not only because of the specific things that you've said, but also we're gonna be living through this area where there's gonna be enormous change and that's exciting. With science in general, with animal science, with human science, it's gonna be an exciting period I think over the next five years in general.
Tanya Schoeman: I agree and the other thing that, that I can mention, and again, I am my own prime example, is millions of people acquired a puppy or a kitten during COVID. So I have my own pandemic pets, and the internet and Instagram and social posts are full of pandemic pets. Now these puppies and kittens are all now entering midlife.
Tanya Schoeman: So if we can course a shift, a mind shift, in our veterinary care practice, we can start to take these guys and say, let's keep them in their prime. They are in their prime now. Every year matters for healthy ageing. Let's keep them in their prime for as much as we can. Let's start getting them in now.
Peter Higgins: Pandemic pets are a good catalyst for the veterinary profession to put some of your suggestions into play because this is the opportunity now for 6 and 7-year-old animals to do exactly what you've been talking about, to look at it positively and to think about quality of life and the fact that ageing is not a disease and the signs they're showing are not necessarily normal.
Peter Higgins: So now's the time to do it, isn't it?
Tanya Schoeman: Absolutely. And I think, if you speak to veterinary practitioners as well, there's a growing concern that these pandemic pets, when they get to senior age, that the veterinary practices are gonna be overrun with senior pets, and again, if we take it from a preventative angle, we could probably foresee quite a lot of these things happening before we end up with a crisis induced vet visit.
Peter Higgins: If people look at this from a point of view of prevention, they can stop that overload.
Tanya Schoeman: Yeah, and it's fascinating and as I say, I'm my own prime example because my pandemic kitten she's gonna go that way.
Peter Higgins: All right. Look, I'm really enjoying this, but we do have to wrap up. But before we wrap this one up, if there's one mindset shift that you'd like every veterinary professional listening today to take away from our conversation, what would that mindset shift be?
Tanya Schoeman: To me, it would be a emotional mind shift and that is to really understand and communicate with our pet owners that every year matters for healthy ageing. Let's not wait for visible signs of decline before we start the conversation. The ageing begins much earlier, before signs appear.
Tanya Schoeman: To keep our pets in their prime for longer, that is a joint responsibility between our pets and our pet owners and for that to happen, the conversations need to start earlier. Let's turn those conversations into positive conversations. We, for example, have put together a healthy conversation guide for veterinary practitioners with anecdotes and examples of how do we approach this, how do we turn this into a positive conversation and that can be downloaded on the Royal Canin Academy's digital library. And it's a beautiful, healthy ageing conversation guide where one can show owners, this is how the trajectory of ageing goes. This is where we can influence it and let's be positive and let's take it and celebrate it and have the conversations. So for me, I think for me, my answer is ageing is beautiful. It's positive and it's definitely not a doom. It's a beautiful life stage.
Peter Higgins: I think that's a really good time to leave that, that's a beautiful way to put it. Thank you. I've just so much enjoyed this. I've really enjoyed talking to you, Tanya, and for those listening just to summarise, we've been talking to Dr Tanya Schoeman, who is a veterinary specialist physician and also Royal Canin Feline Health Specialist. I'm Dr Peter Higgins, the chair of the Global Nutrition Committee for the World Small Animal Veterinary Association and look forward to talking to you again soon.