Feline Odontoclastic Resorptive Lesions | FORLs

Hey there. This is Dr. Lara. Today I'm here with Goldie. And Goldie is a 10 year old female spay cat. And Goldie was coming in today because she was coming in for just like a checkup. But they had noticed that she had had like a little bit of a decreased appetite. And so when we do a physical exam on cats, Cats don't typically develop periodontal disease very frequently. Small, smaller breed dogs are much more prone to periodontal disease. Cats are much more prone to something called they're ready for it. It's a mouthful. Feline odontoplastic resorptive lesions. Okay. Typically we'll call them florals. F O R L. That's how we'll put in our medical records. And so essentially, you know, these are kind of the way that I've heard the dental experts that I work with explain it is these are lesions or a disease where it kind of starts rotting or eating. The body starts eating away at the tooth. Sometimes it starts on the inside, sometimes it starts on the outside. And what as the stages progress of the disease, it'll eventually cause the tooth to completely disintegrate. And so normally this is something that can be very painful because once it eats into the part where the pulp is or the nerve, then of course that's like a lightning rod whenever they go ahead and put something up against it or if they drink water because it's cold. And so it is something that does usually require surgical removal of the tooth. Sometimes people, if they're any particular situation where, you know, they might not be able to afford the surgery, they say, well, can we just leave the tooth in there and just let it dissolve and or disintegrate? And yes you could. The issue is that you don't know how long that's going to take and therefore we don't know how long the cat's going to be in pain for. On top of which, if it is happening and the pulp is exposed, then there is a possibility of having an infection, set up shop and then that can lead to much bigger problems. Now this is not a surgery that I normally do. It's usually something that I bring dental experts in. The cat's jaw is very, very thin. And when you're removing teeth, you typically do have to remove some bone from the jaw to get the teeth. If you don't know what you're doing, you're either A going to take a lot of time doing this, B, you're going to cause more trauma in there than is absolutely necessary or C worst case scenario, you could actually potentially fracture the jaw and then you've got a whole nother set of problems. The other issue is when you're removing these particular kinds of lesions, the teeth sometimes tend to kind of fall apart depending on how bad the lesions are. And so it can be kind of tricky. So my recommendation is if your cat has one of these lesions, Abraham will put some of those lesions on the video. Right around now, you'll see a chart that has a picture of the different stages and what it kind of looks like. And then you will have some pictures of Goldie's mouth in here right around that. And you'll be able to see what it looks like in her and then what it looks like in some other cats as well. If you guys found this video helpful, please give us a thumbs up. Subscribe. Subscribe. Share with somebody that you think might need to see this. This is a condition that is seen, I want to say, in probably 75% of 75 to 80% of cats after the age of five. So they're not super old cats. It is something that is very young. So be safe. Thanks for watching and have a great.