Folate supplementation in cats

RE: Folate supplementation in cats

Lucy Fleming — Fri, 18 Jan 2019 16:57:04 GMT

[quote user="Laura Marshall"]Looks like this cat is out to win (?) a comorbidities record![/quote] He's certainly trying!

[quote user="Michael Woodhouse"]Get the owner to buy some brewers yeast tablets. The cat will eat them like treats. Our cat use to go mad for them.[/quote] Thanks Michael. The owners have actually trialled brewers yeast for this cat before - he did like it but sadly it led to profuse diarrhoea! (He definitely has some weird intolerances...)

RE: Folate supplementation in cats

Michael Woodhouse — Wed, 16 Jan 2019 23:26:09 GMT

Get the owner to buy some brewers yeast tablets. The cat will eat them like treats. Our cat use to go mad for them. They contain all the B vitamins including folate.

RE: Folate supplementation in cats

Laura Marshall — Wed, 16 Jan 2019 18:29:28 GMT

I was also reading your post with EPO in mind. Just to add that they can need iron supplementation in addition to this.

Looks like this cat is out to win (?) a comorbidities record!

RE: Folate supplementation in cats

dred.hall — Wed, 16 Jan 2019 17:40:41 GMT

Folate deficiency in people with coeliac disease and in experimental animals causes macrocytic anaemia, villus blunting and reduced brush border disaccharidase expression, but there are no studies in cats and dogs looking at the effects of deficiency (or supplementation when low) and we rarely see macrocytic anaemia in cats. Our focus has been on cobalamin but even then the haematological effects are not the same as pernicious anaemia in humans.

However, there are no studies showing supplementation causes harm, so I would supplement unless pilling this cat is going adversely affect its QoL. However we don't know what the dose should be (200 micrograms per cat per day is recommended by the GI Lab in Texas <http://vetmed.tamu.edu/gilab/research/folate-information>,
so the dose of folate in Cobalaplex is about right. Although Cobalaplex will also give extra B12, that's not necessarily a problem as the cat is likely to become B12 deficiency over time, and over-supplementation has not been shown to cause any harm.

If the anaemia is due to the CKD, then EPO injections might help more.