Basics of Dental Hygiene for Cats

Basics of Dental Hygiene for Cats
Hi this is Dr. Greg McDonald and I here for Expert Village.com. We are talking about cat dental disease. I wanted to just summarize all the things we have talked about today. Cats are born with their baby teeth at first and they lose all their baby teeth at about 6 months of age. You very rarely see any dental disease in the baby teeth but occasionally some of those teeth will be retained and retained deciduous teeth should come out. The next thing is that as cats get older you start seeing a lot of tartar building up by their teeth. Tartar building up on their teeth is inconsequential unless it turns into gum disease. We want to prevent the tartar and we can do that with home brushing, special diets, and special chew toys. There are lots of choices for that and we try to avoid the tartar so that it does not turn into gum disease. Later in your cat’s life if you’ve done all these things you may still get some gum disease and some times genetics pre-exposed to having gum disease and you may have to have dentistries all through your cat’s life. But later on in their life it is very common for us to see cat’s that have so much dental disease that they actually do need to have their teeth cleaned and then we do some pre-screening blood work, we use the safest anesthetic possible and we use a lot of monitoring devices to be sure that the animal can make it through the anesthetic. We clean the teeth, polish the teeth and we x-ray the teeth to be sure there are solid roots behind every tooth and then we go ahead and send your cat home with a dose of antibiotics to be sure he doesn’t get a secondary infection from the cleaning; so good care at home first and proper diet. You may avoid having to have dentistries. If you need dentistries, check with your veterinarian to be sure that they are doing all these extra things to be sure that your cat is going to make it through the anesthetics.