Diagn?stico e tratamento de Tritrichomonas foetus em gatos com diarreia cr?nica

• Autor(a) principal: Carrasco, Lara Patricia Santos
• Data de Publicação: 2016
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da UFRRJ
• Texto Completo: https://tede.ufrrj.br/jspui/handle/jspui/2268
• topic: cats; diarrhea; gatos; diarreia; Tritrichomonas foetus; Medicina Veterin?ria

Tritrichomonas foetus has been recently recognized as an important cause of diarrhea in various countries. The aim of this study was to diagnose and treat the infection by T. foetus in cats treated at HVPA of UFRRJ, identify the clinical relevance of this parasite, the risk factors, presence of co-infections and clinical response to treatment. In this study, were admitted 100 felines, from different breeds, both sexes and from 16 weeks of age. As inclusion criteria, patients had to have diarrhea history for more than three weeks, with little success of clinical response to treatments previously used. From the stool samples obtained by colon washing or spontaneous defecation it was conducted direct examination of stool, centrifugal flotation technique and real-time PCR. Of the 100 cats selected for this study, 10% had T. foetus infection. Most positive animals were over one year old (70%) and only 30% had up to 1 year old. Cats were 80% purebred and 20% were animals mongrel. The clinical signs present were diarrhea (60%), weight loss (10%), hemoatochezia (30%) and presence of mucus in the stool (20%). Only two animals were positive for the antigen of FeLV virus, and theses showed more severe case of diarrhea. Three animals showed co-infections with other enteropathogens (30%), one with Giardia, one with Cryptosporidium and one with Cystoisospora. All treated animals showed clinical improvement with the administrations of ronidazole at a dose 30mg/kg every 24 hours during 14 days and showed no recurrence until the recent time. We can conclude that T. foetus infection is an important differential diagnosis in cats with chronic diarrhea, which cats of any age and regardless of whether purebred or not, may have the infection, other enteropathogens needs to be investigated in all cases and the treatment was effective in the resolution of clinical signs of all treated cats.