Endocrinology

Endocrine disease is where general practice does some of its most durable work. A diabetic cat, a hyperthyroid cat, a dog with Cushing's syndrome: each is a patient the clinic will see many times a year, for years, with a client who has to learn to give medication and watch for trouble at home. The diagnosis is often the easy part. Monitoring, dose adjustment, and keeping the client engaged are where cases succeed or fail.

This hub gathers our reference guides on the six endocrine conditions a small animal practice manages most often, alongside the endocrine news we cover. Every guide is built from published guidance and the primary literature, and lists the exact sources it was drafted from. The field's reference documents include the AAHA diabetes management guidelines, the feline diabetes consensus guidance from the International Society of Feline Medicine and International Cat Care, the AAFP guidelines on the management of feline hyperthyroidism, the ACVIM consensus statement on spontaneous canine hypercortisolism, the terminology project of the European Society of Veterinary Endocrinology, and the endocrine chapters of the Merck Veterinary Manual. Not all of those are openly readable, so each guide cites only what we could read in full. Where a professional body has renamed something, the guides use the current term and note the older one, since both are still in daily use: hypercortisolism and Cushing's syndrome, hypoadrenocorticism and Addison's disease.

The field has moved in ways that change routine care. Continuous interstitial glucose monitors have become a common alternative to the in-clinic blood glucose curve. Sodium-glucose cotransporter-2 inhibitors gave feline diabetes an oral option, with patient-selection cautions that the labels and guidelines spell out. The guides report those developments as findings and label language. They do not give doses unless a cited source states them, and wherever a dose appears it carries a note to verify it against the current label and the patient in front of the clinician.

Screening and interpretation questions get as much space as treatment. A total T4 inside the reference interval in a sick older cat, a low T4 in a dog with non-thyroidal illness, a positive low-dose dexamethasone suppression test in a dog with no clinical signs: these are the points where the consensus statements urge caution, and the guides quote that caution directly. For technicians, the sections on sample handling, test timing, and home-monitoring instruction are written to be usable on their own. For managers, the recheck schedules the guidelines describe are a practical basis for building recall protocols.