Multimodal pain management for geriatric cats combines pharmacological and non-pharmacological approaches to achieve better analgesia with fewer side effects than single-drug protocols.
Multimodal pain management for geriatric cats reflects the understanding that chronic pain involves multiple physiological pathways that require multiple therapeutic targets. Single-drug protocols that rely entirely on NSAIDs address inflammation but not central sensitization, neuropathic components, or the anxiety-pain amplification cycle that characterizes chronic pain syndromes. The addition of nerve growth factor antibody therapy to the analgesic toolkit represents the most significant advance in feline chronic pain management in decades, providing long-acting analgesia through a novel mechanism suitable for cats that cannot tolerate NSAIDs due to concurrent kidney disease. The integration of physical therapy provides welfare benefits beyond analgesia by maintaining mobility that enables natural behavior expression.