Anaemia and Bone Marrow Sample?

I have an 18month old cat.

He is eating, drinkign and playing normally.

He recently been tested and found to be severely anaemic and has swollen spleen. A scan of the spleen shows no growths or lunps, just and enlargement.

He has had several blood tests.

The vet now wants to take a bone marrow sample to test for Lukaemia.

Cans he not tell from the blood tests if he has lukaemia?

I'm losing faith in my vet as he looks likely to have had this condition for a while adn she only performed a blood test at my insistence (he had pale gums and nose)

Please help!

Bone produces three things - red blood cells, white blood cells and platlets.

To be able to treat the anemia correctly, you need to know if the bone marrow is actually producing them. If the marrow isn't producing them, you are going to go in one direction. If they are being produced, but destroyed in the body or excessively stored in the spleen, that takes you another direction.

Leukemia comes in two forms - acute and chronic. Acute is the type that most people think of - very high number of white blood cells, very ill. The chronic type has more white blood cells than normal, but not to the level seen in an acute case. And some people and pets will, as their normal level, have a higher than normal number.

It is possible for the bone marrow to fill up with immature white blood cells, causing a decrease in the red blood cell production, but still not release the white blood cells show up in the blood. It is not as common, but it does happen.

I would do the biopsy. It does require sedation and your cat will have a sore hip (we never even give human patients pain meds for it), but it takes longer to prepare to do it than it does to do it. It will take the lab several days to get the results back.

The blood tests have alreadys hown that there are red blood cells of verious degrees of formation so i assume that the bone marrow is at least producing the cells. Just not enough by the looks of things.

Do you know why the spleen would be so enlarged?