A cat that drinks more water than usual, skips a meal here and there, and seems a little thinner than last month is easy to dismiss. Cats are particular. They go through phases. But in a cat over eight or nine years old, those three changes together point toward one organ more than any other: the kidney.
Chronic kidney disease, sometimes called chronic renal failure or CRF, is among the most common conditions diagnosed in older cats. The kidney does not fail suddenly in most cases. It loses function gradually, over months or years, and by the time a cat shows obvious signs, a significant portion of working kidney tissue is already gone. That is the central problem with this disease: the signs that appear earliest are the ones most likely to be attributed to age, heat, or a cat just being a cat.
