Geriatric veterinary pharmacology.

Geriatric dogs and cats are an important group of patients in veterinary medicine. Healthy geriatric patients have similar physiology and presumably pharmacology as healthy adult animals. Geriatric patients with subclinical organ dysfunction are overtly healthy but have some organ dysfunction that may alter the clinical pharmacology of some drugs. Geriatric patients with an overt disease are expected to have altered drug pharmacology for some drugs based on the underlying disease. Diseases including cardiovascular, renal, hepatic, osteoarthritis, neurologic, and neoplastic are expected in the geriatric population and discussed, including the effects of the underlying disease and potential drug-drug interactions.