This is the Histing Feline Podcast, a weekly program that is about everything cat. The Histing Feline features experts and other cat associated authors who share their knowledge and perspectives about dealing with felines. From strays and ferals to adoption, health, and cat psychology. We hope the topics give you helpful and interesting insight into the world of cats. Now, here is the host of the Hissing Feline, Clark Freer.
SPEAKER_01Thank you for joining me for this week's episode of the Hissing Feeling, a podcast about everything cats. I'm your host, Clark Greer. I have a confession to make. Now that might not sound too exciting to most people, but research findings are not only related to academia, they can help professionals better understand their work. We'll be talking about feline research studies and their benefits in a few minutes. But first, I'm excited to be joined today by Dr. Bruce Cornreich. He is a board-certified veterinary cardiologist and the director of the Cornell Feline Health Center at Cornell University's College of Veterinary Medicine. Dr. Cornreich, it's great to have you today on the Hissing Feline.
SPEAKER_00Well, thanks for having me, and it's great to be here.
SPEAKER_01Before we launch into some of the more, I guess, weighty matters today, how did you personally become focused on heat feline health?
SPEAKER_00Well, it's an interesting question. Actually, the thing that first got me interested in veterinary medicine in general was my first pet ever, my pet cat tiger. When I was eight years old, he actually swallowed a needle and thread that had been left around the house. And I very clearly remembered being brought to the veterinarian. My father brought us, and the veterinarian took a radiograph or an x-ray of tiger and put that radiograph up on the screen, and you could see the outline of Tiger's body and the needle lodged in his neck, which was blew my mind. I was like, that is amazing. And I subsequently had to care for him and flush his wounds, and uh that really got me interested in veterinary medicine in general. So that's my motivation for being a veterinarian. And I've lived with cats for most of my life. Um, so I'm very interested in cats from a personal perspective. And uh, you know, being a veterinary cardiologist, um, I also work with a lot of cats in the clinic. So um my career was motivated by cats and has been informed by cats and it has been heavily involved with feline health. Um so that's sort of uh the short answer to a very long story, I guess.
SPEAKER_01I'm sure as a kid, if that were me, I'd be saying, oh no, what do we do next? And uh I guess you found the whole process interesting and and there led into veterinary medicine.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it was really, I mean, I literally I could see the picture in my mind right now of just being amazed at this imaging of uh something that you could see inside the body, for example, and ultimately that led to our ability to uh treat tiger, and he actually uh did quite well and ended up living a long and happy life after that.
SPEAKER_01Now, turning to the uh Coronaro Feline Health Center, there are three components of this mission that range from inquiry to educating people about cats. Would you uh highlight some of those? Because I know each one of them is a really important aspect of what you do there at the center.
SPEAKER_00Sure, thank you. Um yeah, our our um mission is to improve the world for all cats. So a better world for all cats is really what we strive to do. And we do this through some basic pillars. The first being the support of feline focused research at Cornell University. So basic research, meaning bench top in a laboratory, clinical research involving patients, that sort of thing, uh, runs the gamut, and really this is a major core of um the way we strive to achieve our mission is supporting research, which really forms the basis for all improvements in our ability to diagnose, treat, and prevent disease in the future. Uh we also provide education to veterinarians and veterinary professionals and to the cat-loving public in the form of our website, in the form of some things like AI uh uh technologies, which we can talk about in a little bit. Uh things like our Fred Scott Feline Symposium, which is a very well-known uh uh professional symposium that we host at the college every year, and also by just interacting personally with cat owners, uh cat uh breeders, uh, veterinary professionals, uh, with questions that come in either by email or by phone. So uh the personal touch is very important to us. And also uh doing outreach, providing support services for uh shelters, uh veterinary professionals, and owners who may have cats that have health problems. So those are sort of the three pillars upon which our mission uh uh lies.
SPEAKER_01Uh you mentioned that supporting that research is obviously crucial for that. Uh supporting research is the core of the center's efforts. And we were talking about that uh several days ago. How does that contribute to uh feline health?
SPEAKER_00Sure. I I mean uh research really forms the the core, uh you know, scientific research, really meaning well-designed studies that are uh you know designed appropriately and interpreted uh appropriately, uh, form the core for advancements in all sorts of medicine, whether you're talking feline, um any species, including humans. So really uh asking appropriate questions, designing appropriate studies to um answer those questions, you know, and and the answer to those questions, of course, involves the appropriate analysis of data. So really uh whatever species you're talking about, uh with respect to health care, well-being, and improvements in well-being, uh the basis of this really is uh research.
SPEAKER_01Research also goes beyond today's cat health and issues by also improving feline health in the future. What types of uh things uh would help to do that, to improve lives of cats and obviously owners of the animals?
SPEAKER_00Pretty much all research, and you d depending uh d upon your perspective, you could certainly say that all research will improve, is designed to improve things in the future. So whether we're talking about uh helping, you know, supporting the development of novel tools to combat viral infections through vaccines, uh improvements in and in our ability to uh understand mechanisms of disease like chronic uh gingivostomatitis in cats, um uh uh the or uh treating cancer or heart disease. Uh these things that are be d being done now, uh research studies will ultimately be applied clinically in the future. So the goal uh of this type of research uh for of biomedical research is to better understand disease processes so that we can identify novel targets uh for the treatment, diagnosis, and prevention of disease in the future.
SPEAKER_01And uh in the second segment today, uh we will be talking about uh uh specific connections. You've done some work and we we'll talk about that in a little bit, between cats and humans related to cancer. So I think that's uh that's one of those things where you're doing initial research about one particular type of topic, but it it really has a very wide uh effect uh for other practitioners.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. Uh and many mechanisms of disease are well conserved across species. So if we learn about uh the mechanism of disease and how to diagnose and prevent and treat disease in one species, in many cases that informs our ability to do these things in other species.
SPEAKER_01We talked also uh several days ago about collaborative research that the Center is involved in. Would you uh talk about some of those things that you've worked with?
SPEAKER_00Aaron Ross Powell Uh Collaboration is is vital uh in research because it's reasonable uh to understand that no one uh laboratory or group uh has the breadth and depth of uh expertise to answer all questions that may come up with in addressing a particular um problem. So uh it's it's collaboration is uh is key for scientific research and biomedical research. So uh it's very common for uh people that we fund, for example, and the the folks that we fund in terms of the principal investigators, these are all Cornell University faculty. Uh it's very common for them to collaborate with other people, either uh in different colleges. So perhaps you know if I fund if we fund people, for example, at the College of Veterinary Medicine, they commonly will collaborate with people uh in other colleges here at Cornell or also at other uh universities throughout the world. So um this is uh the I the ideal sort of I guess expression of teamwork. Uh teamwork means you know everybody working together to uh uh reach a goal, and in this case the goal would be understanding and improv uh diseases and under and improving our ability to again diagnose, treat, and prevent them. So this is very common uh in biomedical research and certainly among the folks that we fund.
SPEAKER_01And uh it also enables people to use their specialization or special types of skills to contribute to those studies and the the results and being able to interpret them to you. Absolutely. I read about on the website uh consulting service. The center works with veterinarians and other professionals, and you mentioned that earlier as one of the uh as one of the important parts of what your mission is. It also provides information for cat owners. How does that service operate?
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. This is called our community consultation service, and this is a service where owners can call us, and for a small fee, they can talk with our uh veterinary consultants regarding uh questions that they may have about problems, health problems that their cats have. Now, importantly, this is not designed to take the place of a veterinary visit, it's it's and we are very clear about that. It's more to help owners understand problems and perhaps come up with questions that they can ask their veterinary team uh about. Uh so we really view this uh one-on-one approach as being something that makes us quite unique. There are places, as as your listeners uh obviously will know, uh, where you can get health information on online uh on the internet. In many cases those are reliable, in some cases less so. But it's harder to get people that will spend uh time with you and and talk about um what might be going on with their cat or or concerns that they may have, and that's really important to us. So we have veterinary consultants that are uh will address general problems, and we all also have specialists. So, for example, I'm a veterinary cardiologist, um, and I will speak with cat owners about, in my case, uh, you know, problems that their cat uh owners may be having with their cat's hearts. But the community consultation service is something that we really view as being vital to our mission and and our support of cat owners.
SPEAKER_01The center's website also has a long list of articles about feline health issues uh as a part of its education and outreach, from everything from hairballs to fungal infections. I'm just curious, what are some of the most accessed links that people are interested in getting information about?
SPEAKER_00Uh funny you should ask me that, uh, because I I actually pulled up in anticipation of this question, I pulled up the list. So I'll I'll give you uh I'll give you top to bottom. Uh feline immunodeficiency virus, feline leukemia virus, hyperthyroidism in cats, feline infectious peritonitis, toxoplasmosis in cats, feeding your cat, chronic kidney disease, feline diabetes, zoonotic disease, meaning referring to what people can catch from their cats, and then feline pancreatitis. So you can see that some of these uh address most of them address disease processes in cats. Um of them are more like um husbandry type things, like the one feeding your cat. People want to know what's the best way to feed my cat. So uh it it runs the gamut, but that's the list of the top, I guess that's the top ten.
SPEAKER_01So we had a cat that lived to be almost 21, and as she got older, she had Yeah, that's a long time. I think she'd still be alive if she didn't have some heart issues, too. But yeah, that's the heart issues are very common in cats, yeah. Yeah, so uh so we got we got kind of used to that, but she was a stubborn old cat, so that's probably why she lived so long. But um yeah, so she had kidney issues and she had low thyroid. We had we had to give her a thyroid pill every day, which was really interesting. I've seen memes about how to give your cat a pill, and that's probably those are probably really accurate. But your site, yeah, your site gives lots of information that if somebody is interested in in that that that would really be at least a place to start, and maybe get an idea, and and in uh coordination with their veterinarian, they could they'll have some uh pretty good information on that.
SPEAKER_00Oh, absolutely. And we we view this information, you know, we take pride in the um uh quality of the information we provide, and we view ourselves as being an adjunct to the veterinary care that's provided by cat owners' veterinary teams.
SPEAKER_01The Cornell Feline Health Center's website has several different sections that relate to CAT health and a newsletter for health center members. How might someone become a member?
SPEAKER_00Well, thanks for asking that. And and the first thing I want to say is that everything we do is made possible by the kindness of our donors. We are 100% philanthropically supported, so uh that's very important to us, and we're so thankful to our donors. Uh folks can make donations and or they can become members. And if you want to uh become a member, you can visit our website and look under look under Giving and Membership. At that, if you click that tab, you can either make a donation and or you can become a member. Membership has we have multi-tiered membership with different membership perks that are really quite unique, uh fun, and informative. So if folks want to join us, please take advantage of that opportunity. We'd love to have you be part of our team.
SPEAKER_01You're listening to the Hissing Feline. I'll be back in a minute with today's guest, Dr. Bruce Cornreich, Director of the Cornell Feline Health Center at Cornell University's College of Veterinary Medicine.
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SPEAKER_01Welcome back to the second half of today's episode of The Hissing Feline. I'm your host, Clark Greer. My guest on this episode is Dr. Bruce Cornwright. He's the director of the Cornell Feline Health Center at Cornell University's College of Veterinary Medicine. Earlier this year, a study led by faculty at the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine shows parallels between cat and human cancers. Would you talk about the study and its findings?
SPEAKER_00Sure. This was a very interesting study. And what it did was it characterized what's called the oncogenome of the domestic cat. So oncogenes are genes that are involved in mutations in these genes bring about different types of cancers. And this particular cancer actually looked at 13 different tumor types in cats, and there were actually a total of 493 samples of these 13 different types. And what they were looking at was to tr they were trying to determine which genes were sort of activated or mutated, which oncogenes in these different types of cancers. And they actually found a pretty high similarity between the types of genes that were mutated in cats and those that were mutated in similar types of cancers in humans. And this these identifying these types of mutations in the oncogenome of the domestic cat is clearly helpful not only for cats, because if you can understand the genetic mechanism of a disease, you can sort of ultimately the goal would be to identify, again, therapeutic targets, diagnostic targets to treat the disease these different diseases in cats, but it may also inform our ability to do that in other species, including humans. So this aligns with this notion of what we call a one-medicine approach, meaning the notion that you learn about a disease in one species and it informs the understanding of the disease in another. The mechanism of these respiratory diseases is primarily by inhalation of respiratory droplets, things like that, nasal secretions, uh and that can be spread by things like coughing, seizing, that sort of thing. I believe the study that you're talking about was looking at evidence of exposure through antibodies in cats. And the this idea of diseases and and particularly infectious diseases in one species being transmissible to other species is a very important one because uh many, if not most of the diseases that we um encounter in terms from the infectious realm uh are examples of diseases that are that uh evolve in one species and then jump to another. So uh being aware of the potential for this to happen and being vigilant for when it may be happening or could happen are really important in terms of public health. So not only for the well-being of animal species, but also for humans. So it's not uncommon for viral diseases to jump from one species to another. Uh, and there are examples, so bird flu, um, HIV, these are diseases that evolved in one species and went to another, flu in general, um, uh, which now affects you know millions and mean millions of people worldwide. Um, that is uh a common theme, and it's important to keep uh be vigilant and uh uh kind of be on a lookout and react um when this happens.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so it's it's possible then, and the question I had is it possible, but you're talking about uh these things that are airborne diseases and so forth jumping from one species to the other and even contracted by humans.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. I mean, and that is, you know, that is a big concern in public health is the notion of uh viral diseases, for example, originating in one species and ultimately becoming transmissionable to humans.
SPEAKER_01AI has become artificial intelligence has become a big tech story over the past few years. It's almost like every day I'm gonna read about something about AI. The uh Cornell Feline Health Center works with it, it is called Cat GPT. I thought that was a very clever title. That people can use yeah that people can use to ask questions about serious cat health issues. Could you talk about how that system works?
SPEAKER_00Sure. This is a platform that is designed, and you know, uh much of what determines the usefulness and the effectiveness of AI uh is what kind of what it uses to inform what information it uses. So this particular platform uses our health topic information here at the college and also uh the National Library of Medicine's PubMed platform. Uh and basically by using this, it's called the large language model, using all the information contained within these two basic sources, uh users can ask questions and they can receive answers about uh cat uh health problems. And there's also some uh fun aspects of this. Uh there are games that you can play, there are kind of quizzes that you can take. But uh this is sort of our initial foray into leveraging AI so that our stakeholders and the public can learn more uh about feline health, get answers that They need, have some fun uh with feline health and with kind of cats in our culture, even. Um but you know, AI is really uh I understand people uh appropriately have some concerns about AI, uh, but it also has tremendous potential and not only potential, it is already achieving tremendous improvements in health in both animal species and humans.
SPEAKER_01People can learn more about it. I was reading the article about this, and it's interesting the the types of questions people ask in general about cats. So they could all they could also do something like that if they are using cat GPT. Yes. No, uh cats have interesting habits, and uh we have to watch that our calico, she's almost ten. She doesn't slip through the door that leads to our garage, she loves to go through doors. I've never figured out why she does that, even though it's absolutely freezing cold and the cement is cold. But you have an idea about why cats do that.
SPEAKER_00Well, it's it's an interesting question, and I you know, I can't get inside the mind of a cat. You know, they cats are you know culturally we think of them as being curious. Uh presumab presumably there is something ben evolutionarily beneficial to cats being curious. Uh you know, cats like to hunt, uh cats uh their senses are very keen. Um so it is true, while I can't say for sure why a cat would want to slip through a door, for example, um uh they are naturally curious and uh presumably there are evolutionary benefits to them being curious with respect to um hunting, acquiring food or or uh resources that they mean they may need, uh water, places to hide, also avoiding uh being preyed upon by other species. So I don't know the answer definitively, and you know, I'm not a behaviorist. Uh but presumably you know all behaviors evolve over time. And um presumably that curiosity and that that desire to be outside perhaps and hunt or uh that's or stalk things, uh that's something that has evolved over a very long period of time.
SPEAKER_01They do like to get on surfaces that uh are like cement. Why do they like to why do they want to do that? It's warmer in the house.
SPEAKER_00I don't really know for sure. You know, they do have preferences for certain things. They like to get high up, for example. Right? If you notice cats, they like to get on counters, they like to kind of get high, presumably so they can kind of have a large view of things, and maybe this is something that's evolved from uh their um uh predatory behavior. Uh so we don't really know for sure there's a lot of speculation, but certainly uh their curious behaviors are uh the subject of uh very intense interest by many people.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and and it's interesting that that uh folks such as yourself and other researchers are actually looking into these types of issues. I find it I find it fascinating.
SPEAKER_00Oh no, we're finding out uh a lot more about uh behavioral aspects of cats. Um, cats for a long time weren't as much as well studied as as, for example, dogs for a variety of reasons, but we're finding out a lot more of them behaviorally with respect to, for example, their interactions with people. It's pretty clear that they're a lot more keyed into our behaviors, reading our body language, reading our vocalizations than we gave them credit for even 20 years ago. So um as as time goes on and the research progresses, we'll learn more and more. So don't be surprised if we learn more uh and more about the way that cats know us better than perhaps we think they do.
SPEAKER_01It's been great discussing feline research and how it helps us to better understand cats in today's show. And I want to especially thank Dr. Bruce Cornreich, Director of the Cornell Feline Health Center at Cornell University's College of Veterinary Medicine for visiting with me today. It's really been a pleasure to talk to you the last uh half hour here, Doctor.
SPEAKER_00Oh, thanks so much, and thanks for having me.
SPEAKER_01Please subscribe to this podcast and remember to share the program with other cat lovers. I also want to thank my producer and wife, Georgia, and audio tech Garth Avery at Cornell University. Please stop again next week for another episode of the Hissing Feline. Until then, keep hurrying.
SPEAKER_03Content on the Hissing Feline podcast is for information and entertainment purposes only, and it's not intended to provide medical, veterinary, or legal advice. Please consult your veterinarian and local and state authorities before dealing with feral and stray cats. Opinions expressed are those of the hosts and guests, and not necessarily those of Duracho Cat Media LLC. References to products or services do not imply an endorsement. The Histing Feline podcast is a production of Duracho Cat Media LLC and has been blessed by our rescue cats, Bridget and Maddie. All content is used with permission or under fair use.