Feline autoimmune disease

I took marley to the vet on friday after he was panting/coughing when he would play rough for a long period of time.
the vet checked his heart and lungs, said they sounded good. his trachea was inflamed, he would cough if the vet rubbed on it, his eyes were red and watery and his nose was dark pink, also he has acne on the sides of his mouth, he sneezes a lot....so the vet diagnosed him with feline autoimmune disease. also, said the coughing/panting is likely asthma brought on by the auto immune disease.
the vet said he would have flare ups his whole life and this condition cats are born with. he also said it wouldn't decrease his life expectancy as long as he is healthy.
does anyone have experience with this?? i looked on the web but didn't find anything to be very helpful. TIA

I am so sorry.........Good luck with that. My kids had asthma.

I am very sorry.. Do you mean FIV? You might find more about it using that as a search key.

The vet said he didn't think it was FIV, but if he gets worse or never gets better (always has flare ups) then he would test for it. marley was tested for it at 10 weeks, it was negative, but they said until 6mo you can get a false negative

Originally Posted by NorthernGlow

I am very sorry.. Do you mean FIV? You might find more about it using that as a search key.

Click to expand...

Immune deficiency and autoimmune are opposites. One means the immune system is compromised and can't fight things off, the other is when it's over active and mistakenly attacks the body.


I don't know much about it in cats, but I think their are members here who have their cats on prednisone to suppress the immune system. Asthma, at least in humans, has two components - immune and histamine. If there's a histamine reaction happening (allergies) those can be somewhat controlled to help prevent the immune side of it. Search for past threads on cat asthma. Around the time I joined there was a user on here that had an asthmatic cat she had adopted because she had asthma herself. They both benefited from some changes in the home to cut down on triggers.

I believe her name may have been Gizmo's mom or something similar, the cat was a black and white girl named Gizmo.

As for his eyes, Tomas was having a problem similar to that at one point. I decided to completely stop using clay litters because even using unscented didn't seem to help. Within a day of switching to chicken feed his eyes cleared up, as did some of the coughing. It certainly couldn't hurt to try and see if your litter is a trigger or at the very least irritating.

Tomas coughs, too, occasionally but this has also decreased a lot since we moved. The difference? This house is not a big dust collector. He also pants/breaths really hard after certain types of play - my solution for this is forced breaks and short playtimes with the wand type toys.
I have taken him to a vet for the coughing, she suggested allergies and we did try a weak antihistamine. It helped but I'd rather not have him on meds if environment changes could help. (that and he's a pain in the butt to pill )