Muscle Matters: Cardiac Cachexia in Dogs and Cats

摘要

Traditionally, nutritional modifications have been considered only in dogs and cats with congestive heart failure (CHF) and few, if any nutritional recommendations have been made for animals in earlier stages of heart disease. However, if one waits toaddress nutrition until this later stage of disease, the benefits of optimizing nutrition during the longer, and more common, earlier stages are lost. In addition, there is some evidence for a role of diet in the development of heart disease. Therefore, attention to body composition appears to be increasingly important in both the development and progression of heart disease in dogs and cats.