Assessment and Management of Pain in Hospitalized Cat

Pain is an aversive sensorial and emotional experience, which involves a neurological very complex response. It has an important cognitive component, which makes the pain feeling to be always subjective. In adult human beings, the presence and degree of pain may be expressed verbally. In newborn pediatric patients and cats (in our case) we need a lot of suspicion and must be very proactive to detect pain, since they cannot talk. Pain is considered the fifth vital sign, and we should add to our examination and monitoring protocols identification of pain level in patients, in the same way we measure the body temperature of the heart rate. Several studies show that, under the same conditions, cats receive less treatment for pain than dogs, partly because of a lack of understanding of the pain signs in cats, and partly because of fear to apply the analgesic drugs we have. Fortunately, more and more clinics add good protocols of identification and management of pain in cats.

Understanding of the pain means to understand what means nociception, which consists in processing a harmful stimulus that results in perception of pain. These harmful stimuli may be chemical, thermal or mechanical, and two processes are essential for them to transmit: peripheral sensitization and central sensitization. In case of appearance of harmful stimulus, transduction to the peripheral nervous system occurs, where it is transmitted to the receptor nuclei of the spinal cord and modulated (the stimulus is blocked, its intensity increases), and sent to the brain cortex where it is finally perceived as pain feeling. The most important receptors and molecules involved in this mechanism are opioid, serotoninergic (SE), noradrenergic, NMDA, substance P and glutamate. […]