Cats often experience pain after surgery, but don't always get the treatment they need because it can be more difficult to
assess pain in cats.
There are now two pain scales validated to assess surgical pain in the cat, the UNESP - Botucatu Multidimensional Composite Pain Scale and the Glasgow Composite Measure Pain Scale — Feline.4, 5 The Colorado State University Feline Acute Pain Scale is also a useful tool to
assess pain in cats, although it has not been validated.3 Regardless of how you are assessing feline postoperative pain, we can assume that cats will feel pain.
Lack of understanding about how to
assess pain in cats, coupled with limited treatment options, led many veterinarians to use treatments that were largely unproven in feline patients.
Several recently published studies have evaluated various methods to
assess pain in cats and have identified specific physiological and behavioral changes including a cat's facial expression as a means to
assess pain in cats.2, 3,4
Not exact matches
Development of a behaviour - based measurement tool with defined intervention level for
assessing acute
pain in cats.
Assessing and alleviating
pain in cats is not only a core goal of veterinary medicine, but successfully controlling the
pain of a surgical procedure can also strengthen the human - animal bond and even help reinforce the relationship between veterinarian, client and patient.
The one thing to know with
cats is that it is very hard to
assess whether the animal is
in pain or not, for he is a master
in the art of hiding his
pain so as not to show any weakness to his fellow animals or his predators.
Refinement and initial validation of a multidimensional composite scale for use
in assessing acute postoperative
pain in cats.