Throughout the late 1980s and continuing through the 1990s, many veterinary cardiologists looked at a variety of nutrients, including taurine, in their canine patients with dilated cardiomyopathy. However, it quickly became apparent to veterinary cardiologists that DCM in dogs was not going to have a tidy resolution. Soon after the Science article was published, there was a flurry of research looking for a similar link between nutrition and DCM in other species, including dogs. Adjustments to commercial cat diets soon followed, and since publication of the article 30 years ago, dilated cardiomyopathy in domestic cats has almost completely disappeared.Īs omnivores, the story for dogs isn’t quite so elegant.
This makes perfect sense because taurine is an amino acid that is abundant in meat so carnivores (like cats) never developed the ability to make their own taurine and must get it from their diet. The veterinary community was stunned not only because this was a new report of a dietary nutrient and heart disease, but that the disease was reversible when taurine was added to the diet of affected cats. Veterinarians in the School of Veterinary Medicine at University of California, Davis, reported that a deficiency of taurine, an amino acid, was responsible for the development of dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM), a form of heart muscle disease, in cats. September 17, 2017 – In 1987, a remarkable article was published in the prestigious journal, Science.
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