The Paw-fect Solution: APOP’s fight against pet obesity
The Association for Pet Obesity Prevention (APOP) is a nonprofit organization committed to raising awareness, preventing, and treating obesity and weight-related disorders in pets.
Founded by Ernie Ward, DVM, CVET, APOP’s mission is to tackle the complexities of pet obesity through enhanced understanding and partnership, eradicate weight-based prejudice, support the One Health approach by promoting concurrent weight loss and wellness initiatives, provide resources for veterinary healthcare professionals and facilitate a comprehensive discussion on the effects of pet obesity on health and the human-animal bond.
Building the foundation
The idea for APOP came back in 2004, when Dr. Ward was doing a lot of lecturing and writing, and was noticing more and more weight-related disorders at his clinic in North Carolina, such as young dogs getting arthritis and cats coming in with diabetes at as early as 5 years old.
“As part of these lectures, I would go out for a lot of dinners with fellow speakers and I would ask if they were noticing the same and wax poetic about obesity issues,” he recalled. During one of those conversations, his orthopedics professor from the University of Georgia, Steve Budsberg, told him that if it’s such a big problem, he should do something about it.
“I told him that if he agreed to help me, I would,” Dr. Ward said. “With his support, I assembled a board of directors and started APOP. At the time, obesity in animals was an afterthought; it’s not like it is today. It was considered normal and almost comical – we had Garfield the lasagna-eating cat – so obesity wasn’t viewed as a disease state causing harm.”
With that in mind, Dr. Ward created a three-phase plan, broken out into 15-year increments, and knew the first thing APOP needed to do was raise awareness of the problem and the physiological consequences of obesity.
“I call this the discovery phase, making sure the profession knows this is a problem,” he said.
In 2018, APOP created the Global Pet Obesity Initiative (GPOI) to construct a universal set of pet obesity definitions and assessment standards. Since then, these guidelines have been formally accepted by 25 of the world’s leading veterinary medical organizations.
“The second phase, and the second 15 years, would be on treatments, and that’s where we are now,” Dr. Ward said. “I hoped that once we made the industry aware, we would come up with better innovations than what we had.”
APOP is working with experts in food, pharma and technology around the world to come up with new ideas to fight the challenge of pet obesity.
The third era, which will come in about a decade, will focus on prevention.
“Even though this is what everyone was talking about when we started, you can’t prevent something until you discover, recognize and treat it,” Dr. Ward said.
The one health approach
Dr. Ward recognized early on that pet obesity had many of the same challenges as childhood or pediatric obesity.
“I began reaching out to folks in the pediatric obesity world telling them I believe we are talking about the same stuff,” he said. “Only a handful of folks took me seriously at the time. Those that did realized that many of the communication challenges, adherence to treatment challenges and acceptance challenges were similar.”
So, in 2016, APOP was participated in a Centers for Disease Control and Prevent (CDC) One Health session in Atlanta on obesity, and that led to many human physicians championing the cause.
“Now, by and large, the doctors who accept human obesity in humans recognize that we are struggling on the veterinarian side as well,” Dr. Ward said. “Of course, there are still a large percentage of physicians and veterinarians who don’t view obesity as a disease, so there’s still a lot of work in front of us.”
APOP keeps tabs on the latest trends that impact obesity in pets and one of the notable things of recent years is that the obesity of cats continues to outpace that of dogs.
“What’s happening in cats is the number of them diagnosed with obesity, which is a body condition score of 8 or 9, conditions to rise and is one of the biggest problems we have seen,” Dr. Ward said. “These cats are at the highest risk of developing diabetes, so that’s our biggest concern.”
Another trend is understanding better the hormonal and metabolic changes that occur following the spay or neuter procedure and how that relates to predisposing pets to obesity and obesity-related illness and health complications.
Dr. Ward explained that when you do this at 4-6 months of age, as many vets are taught, it changes the muscular development, the skeleton development and how the fat is deposited.
“Nutrition can help us there,” he said. “As we learn more and more, we are starting to rethink when we spay or neuter. We need to understand the specific nutritional needs that we have to address and that’s something we are learning more about now.”
Key collaborations
APOP has partnered with numerous organizations, which Dr. Ward called instrumental, for success in fighting obesity in pets.
“Up until last year, we took no sponsorship partnership monies and had no external funding because my vision and belief is that if you’re trying to raise awareness, I didn’t want any loose association with any type of funding,” he said.
But now that it’s in the treatment phase, APOP understands the need of collaboration and partnerships.
“We have to help innovate, we have to help inspire and get research and outreach with the folks who are making the changes,” Dr. Ward said. “Over the years, we have established great relationships with most of the folks in the pet food industry, pharmacy and diagnostics, and we are now working together on what we can do better to treat obesity.”
For instance, APOP recently entered into a strategic alliance with Virbac aimed at creating educational resources and tools for veterinary clinics and pet owners, highlighting the significance of customized nutrition in preserving pets’ metabolic health after spaying or neutering.
“Our collaboration with Virbac will better enhance our ability to address pet obesity through innovative nutrition solutions and providing vets with dietary interventions, tools and support,” Dr. Ward said. “This is the only way we are going to make change; we have to partner with private enterprises and encourage companies to help in treating obesity in animals.”
The veterinarian’s role
To solve this problem, it’s going to take everyone in the industry, including the general practitioners.
“We always need their help gathering data,” Dr. Ward said. “The average vet just needs to keep up with the research. Things are rapidly changing and progressing in the field of obesity. A lot of staffs have stalled in their knowledge. It’s not just about achy joints and arthritis. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Kidney disease, respiratory disorders, issues with high blood pressure – and to top it all off, the risk of cancer goes up. My job now is to make veterinarians understand obesity is much more than an aesthetic condition.”
Over the next several years, Dr. Ward expects to see several innovations in the treatment space that can hopefully make a
big difference.
“We’re about to enter into the era of very sophisticated precise treatments, both nutritionally and pharmacological,” he said.
Understanding the link
Nearly 90% of U.S. dogs and cats are spayed or neutered, according to Pet Nutrition Alliance. Dogs are twice as likely to become obese after the procedure and cats are 3.4 times as likely to suffer from obesity once spayed or neutered. Hormonal changes in pets, including alterations in base (basal) metabolic rate and increased appetite, are significant contributors to the obesity epidemic, particularly among spayed and neutered pets. Following these procedures, pets often experience a decrease in basal metabolic rate of up to 30%, coupled with a potential increase in appetite by as much as 60%.
Photo credit: istockphoto.com/RossHelen
