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1. Is My Pet a Senior? Meet Your Vet & What Defines a Senior Pet · Senior Pet Talk | for dogs + cats

• Amanda Steffen: No. If you are listening to Senior Pet Talk, the show where we combine Western and Chinese medicine to give senior dog and cat parents the knowledge, the clarity, and the confidence to make sure that your pets' senior years are their best years yet. I'm Dr. Amanda Stefan, let's get started. Hello, my friend, and welcome to the very first episode of Senior Pet Talk. This is the podcast where we are going to talk about all of your options to help your senior dog and cat, everything from traditional Chinese veterinary medicine to Western medicine treatments. And we like to mix all of those things together here so that we can give your senior pet all of their options and get an individualized plan for them. That makes the most sense and gives them the best quality of life and the best lifespan and the best health span, which is the amount of time that they are living a free of chronic disease, happy, pain-free life. If you are tuning in on YouTube, I have my little French bulldog here with me. His name is Emmet. He is seven years old. And hopefully he will just hang out with us. If you are watching on Spotify and Apple, I do recommend popping over and seeing him because he's just really adorable. So today, on the very first episode, I want to talk to you about when your pet is considered a senior. And I believe very strongly in this because I think there's a disconnect for people. I believe that a lot of people don't want to admit that their pet is a senior. Because somehow we think that senior is some sort of a cuss word. We think that just because we admit that they're a senior, that we're starting this invisible clock on the end of their life. And I just want to debunk that because these guys can live over half their life as seniors. We know that cats, you know, they're seniors before they're even teenagers. They're seniors around the age of 10 to 12 years of age. And I have met so many cats over the age of 20, right? So when we talk about these guys being seniors, it has nothing to do with starting some invisible clock or talking about the end of their life. It has more to do to me with thinking about the things that we can do to support this time of their life. We know that there are some changes that are gonna happen. As they start to get a little bit older. And if we are able to recognize those things, then we are able to combat them earlier and we're able to give them a better life, right? So that is what I want you to know overall is that senior is a beautiful stage of life and it's something that we can support them in. And I truly think that most clinical medicine does not focus on seniorhood. A lot of times we just say, well, they're getting older. This is normal. They're going to slow down. They're going to sleep more. They're going to lose muscle mass. They're going to do all these things. And that is just simply not the way that it has to be. That is my mission in that and A Medicine is to break that mold and to help people understand that there's so much more we can do to give them the best quality of life possible. So today We're going to talk about when your pet is considered a senior. I'm going to go through a couple different groups in that we have cats pretty much across the board. They're going to be about the same. We do have some variations with cats with certain breeds, like mancoons, sphinxes, things like that. They are prone to certain diseases, and that may change their aging into seniorhood a little bit. But for the most part, they're recognized by the feline practitioner board across the board at one age to be considered senior. However, when we talk about dogs, we are going to talk about some variations mostly based on their weight. And this is going to be ideally based on their ideal body condition score. So if your pet is underweight or overweight, that can affect these numbers a little bit. But I want to give you some general guidelines so that you know going into seniorhood when your pet is considered a senior. And then as we go through these episodes, we're gonna work on the ways that we can help them and give them the best life ever. I am gonna talk to you guys about this today, as well as throw in a little bit of information about me. So I am a veterinarian who's been practicing for about 10 years. I have own my own in-home integrative practice. So I do Focusing on senior dog and cat care in the comfort of my clients' home and my patient's home. And I started out doing acupuncture and then realized that there was so much of a need with these patients for more. So I started to learn other modalities. We started to dive into herbal therapy, talked about different Western medicine options to help. And now it is just a full-blown integrative in-home senior dog and cat concierge type of medicine. I truly believe that this is going to be a new era of veterinary medicine and a new part of veterinary medicine that comes to fruition. I think we're going to see a lot more of this concierge type medicine as we are in human medicine, because I think it's extremely needed, especially for our senior dogs and cats. So I do this because of my heart dog. I had a dog, his name was Floyd. If any of you know my history with Floyd, you'll know this story, but I'm gonna go through it a little bit right now. Floyd was the dog who put me exactly in the shoes that you're in right now. Floyd was the dog who stole my heart, and I would have done anything for him. To keep him comfortable and with me longer. And over time, we dealt with things starting out with arthritis. Floyd was a bigger dog, around 75 to 80 pounds. So he started to get some arthritis symptoms as early as seven years of age. And we managed that to the best of our ability. And then over time, we started to notice some other symptoms that seemed to come on rather quickly. One of those now I know was a slip disc or intervertebral disc disease, which we didn't realize for a bit of time. And there was some chronic damage that had been done there. And then some dementia symptoms started to happen. And I wasn't sure whether it was dementia or something else. So he saw a neurologist a couple of times and then we finally decided to pursue imaging. And we found a brain tumor and a secondary tumor in his chest that the oncologist didn't really have any information about because they never really find them. So his brain tumor was ⁓ pituitary microadenoma, and he just did not respond to treatment. We did everything Western medicine had to offer at the time. This was six years ago. So I didn't know about Chinese medicine at the time, or I definitely would have pursued it. But we did radiation therapy. We did surgery on his slip disk. We did everything I could at the time. I tried to find all the supplements. I tried to go look in every direction that I could to help him. And In the end, I don't know that I got a lot more time going through radiation therapy with Floyd. I don't regret it because you don't know what you don't know until you do it. So that is one thing we would talk about a lot here is this hindsight bias. And you don't know. Sometimes you have to make a decision and you don't know down the road whether that's going to be a good decision or a bad decision until you make it. And you have to decide and you pursue it and you find out from there. So I felt very alone in Floyd's care. I felt like I got a little bit of information from each of these specialists, but I don't feel like anyone ever looked at him as a whole and gave me a lot of great information about how I could best help him. And as I was navigating that alone. Pregnant with my first kid, I just felt like there needed to be more. I needed someone to help me. I just there needed to be more in veterinary medicine to help him. And when he passed away, we said goodbye to him about four months after I had my daughter. I went into a particular mental state and I worked for another year or so and then I said, I just have to do something different. I started a social media to help educate people about senior dog and cat care. And I started to pursue Chinese medicine. And I just said, you know, I want to help other people who are in my position to never feel like I felt. I want pet parents to get more time than I got. And I want to give them all this information so that they know before these things are happening and they're able to help their pet. Right. So that's that's my why. Floyd is my why and he will be the keynote of a lot of our conversations because I learned a lot from him. And I do this job every day because of him and with him in mind. And I treat every patient as if they were him so that I can give pet parents more time and give you a more beautiful life with your senior pet. That is my entire goal in this. So that being said, let's dive into some of the details. All right. I often hear people say, you know, I'm scared to bring them to the vet because I think I might hear bad news or I'm afraid that I might find out that I should have been doing something earlier that I wasn't doing and then I'm gonna feel guilty. And, you know, I just wanted to know that I'm doing the best that I can for them. If you are having that emotion, then I want let you know that you are doing the best job that you can. If you are sitting there thinking and racking your brain of like, What can I do? And looking online at all these different things that promise you the world for your senior pet, then you are doing a good job and you're doing the best that you can. And it is just hard to navigate. I am a veterinarian. At the time with four years of experience, I did not know how to care for my senior pet appropriately because there just wasn't anyone there to help educate me. There's not a specialty for senior pet care, although I hope that there is one day, just like there is in human medicine. And a lot of people just push senior pets aside as they start to age and say these things are normal and they're not. And I have seen gigantic transformations in my patients in home and my virtual clients just with the changes that we make that, you know, they will tell me, you know, my veterinarian doesn't think that this is going to do anything because they don't have a lot of information about the supplement. And I a hundred percent want to work in conjunction with family medicine veterinarians to make sure that we're doing the best that we can for the pet because they're the ones that are putting their hands on the pet, right? But I also just want to say it's okay to give a little bit of hope. And it's okay to Try some things that we aren't sure if they're gonna work, but as long as we know they're not going to hurt, then I think it's appropriate for us to try some of those things because what I have learned in my 10 years of practice is that every pet responds differently to a different treatment. So I may give one dog an anti-inflammatory. They may do great with that anti-inflammatory. And then I ask a client. The next day, hey, how is that anti-inflammatory going for Bayer? And they're gonna say, I don't really notice a difference. And clinically, you know, on paper, I would say that's impossible. But what I have learned in practice is that it's completely possible. It is they're all going to respond differently to different treatment protocols. So what I have learned in my practice is that I always trust. the client. If they say this didn't work, okay, let's try something else. Let's figure out what is going to work. And the thing that I love the most is that I have this ever-flowing amount of things that we can try and tweak and adjust until we figure out what works best for that pet, right? So when we are talking about senior pets in dogs, We define this through the Veterinary Medical Associations as the last 25% of a dog's life. Now, here's the thing: we cannot see the future. So we don't actually know what the last 25% of their life is. We have some general guidelines that have been put together based on studying hundreds of thousands of dogs. And when they tend to pass. So we have some groups that we know. Generally, the smaller dogs are going to live longer. Generally, our larger dogs are going to live not as long. So therefore, our smaller dogs become seniors a little bit older in life, and our bigger dogs are going to become seniors earlier on in their life. Right. So it's extremely important to know that because a 10-year-old chihuahua. is absolutely not the same as a 10-year-old gray dane. Those are completely different timelines, unfortunately, and we need to know how to care for them best, right? When we are talking about dogs aged into seniorhood based on weight. So starting out with our toy and our small braid dogs, we're talking about dogs under 20 pounds. They're going to be a senior Somewhere between the age of 10 to 12 years of age. This is talking about our chihuahuas, our yorkies, some of our mini doodles, poodles, things like that, maltises, shutzus, things like that, right? So these guys are going to senior hood a little bit later in life, but we do need to recognize I have done a dental procedure on a 22-year-old miniature bencher. So they can still live a large amount of their life in this seniorhood and knowing how to best care for their organs and their body and their joints and everything like that is going to help them. Moving on to the next grouping are medium-sized dogs. So we say this between about 20 to 50 pounds. In general, if your dog falls within this range, they are going to be considered a senior. Somewhere between the age of eight to 10 years of age. This is going to be things like our Beagles, our cocker spaniels, our border collies. A lot of our like smaller doodles are going to fit into this category. My French bulldog over here, Emmett, he is 37 pounds. And so he is considered a senior probably next year, although given his breed, maybe a little bit younger. When we are talking about our large breed dogs, anything from fifty to ninety pounds, we are talking about these guys going into seniorhood somewhere between the age of six to eight years of age. Okay? So this is talking about like Labradors, Golden Retrievers, German Shepherds, a lot of our other doodles fall into this category are Staffies, pities, those types of things all fall into this category. So thinking about a six-year-old dog as a senior, yes, it can be a little bit sad, but also if I had thought about Floyd as a senior when he was seven and we started to notice some aging changes, I would have been more proactive about his care. Thankfully, Floyd lived to thirteen years of age. It is still never long enough, in my opinion. But I think it's extremely important for us to know that we can combat a lot of this discomfort, a lot of this chronic pain, a lot of these things that go on with our seniors if we know this information earlier. And then our giant breed dogs. So unfortunately our gentle giants, over 90 pounds, most of our like Great Danes, Mastiffs, St. Bernard's, Newfoundlands, St. Pyrenees, those types of things. These guys are actually considered seniors as early as five to six years of age. So again, these guys can still live. I worked on a great Dane for over a year who was 10 years old, and his parents were told that he would not make it to two years old. He had a congenital, which means from birth defect, and they were told that he would not make it to his second birthday. And he was 10 years old when he passed, which is a true testament to how wonderful they did with his care. But also to say, like, just because we predict something doesn't mean that's going to be the way that it goes. And with appropriate care, we can get a very long, happy life with dogs of any size, right? When we talk about cats, typically cats of any size are going to be considered a senior at the age of ten. Is that right, Emmett? Yeah. My dog's looking at me for verification, I guess. Cats do also have a variation from the aha guidelines that talks about them being considered geriatric, quote unquote, at fifteen plus years of age. It's important to know this variation for a variety of reasons. One of those is that when we change from senior with cats to geriatric, our risks of some diseases does go up. So that we know their risks of things like dementia goes up even more. The risks of things like chronic kidney disease goes up from, you know, 30% to upwards 80% in cats that are 15 and over. So it's really important for us to know this information. That brings me to another wonderful point that I want to plug in right here is blood work. So it is extremely important as one of the key factors to know when your pet is a senior, as to know, okay, now we need to make sure that we are doing blood work once a year. And ideally twice a year, if possible. I want you to up your vet visits to ideally twice a year when your pet reaches seniorhood. Because things change really fast. Things can change within weeks to months. And if we're still only having them in for a veterin once a year as a senior, that's not enough. That's not enough for us to be able to talk about all the things that could be changing. That's not enough for us to pick up on subtle muscle changes or subtle arthritis symptoms. Or bumps and lumps and things like that that need to be checked or heart murmurs, things like that, in order for us to give them the best quality of life. So ideally we're gonna up their vet visits to at least twice a year. And that being said, we're also going to make sure that we're doing at least once a year blood work on these guys. Because there was this really interesting study done by IDEX, which is one of the large veterinarian laboratories, and they looked at pets who came in and had routine blood work done that were considered seniors. And they found that two out of five senior dogs, so two out of five dogs that were classified as senior on submission of that blood work had values on their blood work that Indicated a change in their treatment protocol. Now these pets came in for routine care, nothing of concern. They just decided, hey, yeah, Rusty is a senior. We want to do some senior blood work on him. Why not? And nothing to complain about. And they found something significant enough to change the treatment protocol for that pet. In cats, that value actually went up. So in cats, we found that. Three out of five cats over the age of 10 are considered a senior had statistically significant value changes on their blood work to make us warrant a change in their treatment plan. Now that can be something as simple as, hey, we noticed they had a UTI that was going undetected, or hey, they had some crystals in their urine and that needs to be changed as far as what we're doing, or hey, they had this mildly elevated. Kidney enzyme, that means that we need to take a deeper dive into things. It could be something very simple that doesn't mean anything drastic. However, if they had not done that blood work because their pet was labeled a senior, then they might have missed that. And then two years later, a year later, whatever it may be, when their pet is in crisis, because those things went undetected. And the clinical signs were either minimal or none, then we're in this really bad scenario where we may be having to make more drastic decisions for our pets because we didn't catch those things, right? So to me, it is extremely important for you to not only take your pet into the vet more frequently when they're a senior. Ideally, I want them to go in twice a year to be evaluated. I also want to make sure that you're doing blood work at least once a year. We will go into more detail as to what blood work I recommend at senior pet visits on another show, but I do usually recommend checking most clinics have something called a senior profile, which usually includes blood and urine and checks some things like thyroid and more in detail. So I do usually recommend going with whatever that like senior profile is. Again, senior is not a cuss word. So please stay with me here when I say all these things that we're doing are to give your pet a longer and healthier and happier lifespan. It is not meant to scare you or to think about these negative sides of this, but it is extremely important, in my opinion, to make sure that. We are taking care of them to the best of our ability because I want you to have more time with your senior pet than I had with mine. And overall, I just want them to have a happy, wonderful life. And I want you to feel like you did everything that you possibly could to help them. Have you ever left the vet with more questions than answers? And then you drive home and you go straight on to Google. Yeah, I hear that a lot. And honestly, it's exactly why I created my senior pet virtual consultations. Imagine we have 45 minutes where we go through everything, your pet's full history, their specific challenges, their daily life, no rushing. We're gonna cover nutrition, integrative options, whole modifications, and quality of life. And I send you a personalized plan after so that nothing slips through the cracks here. But don't just take my word for it. Chelsea called it a senior pup therapy session and said she felt so much better afterwards. Adiba got recommendations her own vet had never thought to suggest, and Denise said that the consult was incredibly informative and helpful, giving her many options to help her dog Loki feel better. This is the conversation that your senior pet deserves. And honestly, The one you deserve to. The link is in the description. I'd love to help you. So that being said, just do a quick recap for you on the senior cutoffs and numbers. Dogs under twenty pounds, we are typically saying you're a senior between ten and twelve years of age, dogs twenty to fifty pounds, seniors between the age of eight to ten, large breed dogs fifty to ninety pounds twenty. Typically going to be considered a senior between the ages of six to eight years of age. Dogs over 90 pounds, we are typically considered a senior somewhere between five and six years of age. Cats, we are considered seniors at the age of 10, geriatric at the age of 15. However, I do want you guys to always just remember: my dog was in that large breed category. He lived to be 13 years old, had a chow mix, and She lived to be 17 years old. She was 47 pounds or so. So she would have been a senior between eight and ten. She lived to be seventeen. I know plenty of people who have pets that are way past their quote unquote senior year and timeline and ha are doing just so well. I do work on a 14 year old golden retriever. And she's happy. And I have worked on a ten year old Great Dane. I have worked on a fifteen year old Labrador. I have worked on a twenty-two year old miniature pincher. I have worked with a twenty-five year old cat. And she is not the only one that have worked with that is over the age of twenty. I have a client right now, a patient who is nineteen years old. And he's doing better than he was at 18 because of the integrative medicine that we have put forward and into work for him. So I want you to know that you are not alone. I am here with you for this. And I want to make sure that you have all of the information that you can to make sure that you are making the best decisions for your senior dog and cat. 'Cause I know that you are doing the best that you can with the information that you have. I am so proud of you and I really appreciate you being here with me today. Tune in to the next episode and let me know if there's anything that you are really wanting to know about because I am here to serve senior pet parents. I am here to create content that you want to hear. The entire purpose. Of me being here is to help your senior pet. So if there's anything in particular that you want to know about, please leave it in the comments. Find me on social media, DM me, whatever it may be. My website is senior petconnection.com. You can find me on their contact anything like that. I just want to know everything. Okay. You are doing a fantastic job. If you can hear my dog snoring, I apologize, but he looks really comfortable and happy. So hug that senior baby for me. I am so proud of you. Have a beautiful day. That's it for today. If this episode helped you, please leave a review or rate this podcast so we can get the word out to more pet parents who need to hear that they are doing a good job. And if you're interested in working more with me, you can find me on social media or at senior petconnection.com because we all need to stay connected. Remember that you are doing a great job with the information that you have in this moment. And I am just here to give you more of it. See you next week.