Sarcopenia, cachexia and frailty in older cats

May I start asking you, do both sarcopenia and cachexia include low muscle strength? How is one different from the other, and why are these things so important in older cats?

They both probably include low muscle strength.

That's a little bit hard to measure in cats right now.

We don't have a good way of measuring that.

In people, they do things like grip strength and the ability to get out of a chair.

Cats don't necessarily agree to doing these kind of tests.

But certainly with the low muscle mass, with the decrease in muscle mass that is associated with these, I would expect we see a change in muscle strength as well.

The definitions of sarcopenia and cachexia differ slightly.

Sarcopenia is considered to be muscle loss generally associated with weakness in aging cats, humans, mammals o- of all kinds.

It's thought to be an overall concept, at least in mammals.

So this is considered to be a common aging change.

Cachexia is the muscle loss associated with inflammatory mediators due to illness, sometimes injury, but really more with illness, chronic illnesses, heart disease, renal disease that go along with that.

You know, I was thinking earlier about this, and does this include osteoarthritis as a disease? And I guess it could, which means the majority of our cats probably have a degree of cachexia.

These both overlap.

The one doesn't eliminate the chance of having another.

I think most older cats who have cachexia due to chronic disease would also have sarcopenia, so they certainly can be combined, and I think that's probably a very common feature.

In older humans, that can be a common feature to have both of these.

One of the differences between them is with cachexia, the muscle loss can be more profound and rapid.

So I think when we see this in an older cat who's gone downhill, so to speak, that we need to look for something more than an aging change.