Hey guys, my name's Dan, I'm a veterinarian, and today I'm going to cover my three most common reasons for blood in your cat's urine. Number one, bladder infections, or a urinary tract infection, or a UTI. UTIs are caused by bacteria, and the bacteria causes a bladder infection, and how we get it we don't always know, but that can cause blood in the urine, because... The bacteria cause inflammation and the bladder wall gets irritated and the kitty cat pees some blood.
How do we diagnose this? I tend to think of it two ways. You can do a urinalysis or a UA where the veterinarian will get a urine sample and then test it in-house in most cases.
This is a really basic way to do this because they're just going to scan for bacteria and other things that could be abnormal. Well, if they see bacteria, they're like... It's a UTI. Fix the problem, bladder infection done, let's all go home and have lunch.
Now the other option is a urine culture. Urine cultures are very effective at diagnosing infection, right? Because we're going to grow the infectious organism, the bacteria. Unlike a urine analysis, I don't have all that additional information regarding concentration or crystals or glucose or other fun stuff. But what I do have is...
I know exactly what bacteria is in there because you send it off to the lab and they grow the bacteria and if they grow bacteria we know there's a UTI and it tells us how to treat it. It's going to say this antibiotic is the best pick and this one is horrible so don't give this one because you might get resistance. So they're going to funnel you down the best option, the best antibiotic to treat your kitty with. And number two is going to be bladder stones.
Bladder stones are literally that, they're stones in the bladder and they bounce around and cause inflammation and discomfort and usually they can have a secondary bacterial infection. But the bladder stone drives the inflammation and drives the bleeding and drives the infection. So the way we go about diagnosing that is we're going to do an x-ray in conjunction with an ultrasound. So an x-ray is getting diagnosed a large majority of your stones. Literally, it's really cool, guys.
You can just see it sitting right there on the x-ray. Or a very few stones can't be seen on the x-ray. So your veterinarian may do an ultrasound. And when you do that, literally, the ultrasound, you know, the waves go through and the stone sits right there and they go around it.
And you have a nice little shadow and that's your stone. So your veterinarian may do a handful of things to help the bladder feel better like they may give a med for inflammation or pain they may do an antibiotic to either treat or prevent uh infection but being very frank with you your veterinarian's probably gonna say we need to do surgery and that's a bummer but the good news is after you do surgery a lot of times this is fixable and my last one on my list my number three on the list and definitely not to be shortchanged by being the last on my list is feline Idiopathic cystitis or fluted feline lower urinary tract disease. Let's keep it simple.
This disease is inflammation. That's what it is. There's no bacteria. There's no stone.
There's just inflammation. And it's super frustrating because it's really, really uncomfortable. The cat will have blood in their urine.
They will strain. They will be painful. and A lot of times I stutter because a lot of times we don't know how they're getting it.
It's unknown. It's idiopathic. We don't know why they get it. But we do believe it could be from stress or other outside sources. But when they get it, it's really uncomfortable and it really hurts.
And it can lead to other problems too, like getting blocked up. So once diagnosed, we need to be really laser focused on helping to prevent from reoccurring. and hopefully help to clean it up.
Treatment of FIC or fluted is quasi-subjective. They may do some, like, glucosamine to improve the bladder health. They may give something for inflammation or pain.
They may give something to relax the kitty a little bit so they can pee without straining as much. So there's a handful of things you can pick from with FIC and fluted. The most common thing a veterinarian is going to do is change your cat's food.
There's a couple different prescription formulas out there, and your veterinarian will go over a handful with you. But the prescription formulas will help dilute the urine out, help make the urine healthier, to reduce reoccurrence, and hopefully help to resolve the current state of inflammation. The thing to take home, unfortunately, is it's kind of a diagnosis based on exclusion.
because You do your culture, it doesn't grow any bacteria, so it's not infection. You do your x-ray, and there's no stone, so it's not a stone. Your urinalysis shows a bunch of blood, maybe some white blood cells, some inflammation, so you're really focused on inflammation.
But you don't know how we got it. You don't know how long it's going to linger for. All we're trying to do is make the bladder as healthy and comfortable as possible to prevent it from reoccurring and hopefully help shorten the duration of discomfort. With all these, diet is important.
If we ever get reoccurring issues or if we have the last one I mentioned or stones, diet's really, really important. And a veterinarian is going to recommend a couple different diets like Purina. Science Diet, Royal Canin, they all have prescription formulas to help improve dilution of the urine. So go ahead and think that over and realize that they will probably push a diet on your kitty cat.
But you know what? It's a really good idea because diets are really helpful at keeping the bladder healthy and preventing reoccurrences. If your kitty has had one of the three conditions that I just mentioned causing bloody urine, please go ahead and comment below.