Expert: Jessica - 10/28/2011

Question
my female cat now about a year and half old
has developed a pattern of on and off diarrhea that started after she was spayed.
we originally were told that the kitten food was causing it due to too much protein so we started her and her brother on fiber house cat  food. they do not go outside unsupervised
the problem has come back and she acts lethargic, then gets all twitchy and runs around, licking at her back and legs like something is biting at her, but I think its due to internal feeling in her bowels or something. then she will get to the liter and its all runny then of course it goes everywhere. she is almost afraid to go then and sometimes only urinates for a day or 2, then when she does go it is not pleasant
we are at wits end to try and solve this before we have to put her down which we do not want to do. could something have happened internally when she was spayed that could be causing this. her brother eats the same food and is perfectly  normal
they are both farm cats, no particular breed but she is a yellow tiger stripe and her brother looks like a main coon.
out vet just doesn't seem to have an answer let me know if you have some ideas.
thank you

Answer
Hi Larry,

It's extremely rare, but adhesions along the intestines, caused by scar tissue, can occur from a spay surgery that will cause an interruption in digestion. This is not common whatsoever. I think your cat is more likely suffering some kind of bacterial or parasitic infection, or from colitis.

One option would be to have a full fecal examination run to try to detect pathogenic organisms. The full scale tests can be rather expensive, running about $200. This runs very sensitive tests for common and not-so-common germs including giardia, coccidia, tritrichomonas and campylobacter. It will also check for parasitic worm eggs. Or, you can see if your vet will simply treat for the more common offenders if they have not done this already. Most vets are perfectly willing to deworm cats that have diarrhea. They are also pretty willing to treat with an antibiotic called Flagyl, which gets rid of giardia and some random bacterial germs that can cause diarrhea. I have all too much experience with campylobacter, which is rather uncommon in cats, so vets don't think to treat this very often. But it's curable with the antibiotics Baytril or Zithromax. If these don't work, many vets will be willing to move on to the next medication. Albon, Panacur and Tylan are other medications that can be tried to cure diarrhea (but they will not cure campylobacter, which is why I prefer to try Baytril, first). Tritrichomonas, the least common of all these germs, is the one bug that the vet would really need to confirm before treating.

If no antibiotics work for the kitty, it would seem to me that she is suffering from colitis, or less likely, a food intolerance. Food intolerances usually will cause more consistent diarrhea, while colitis causes diarrhea on and off. The treatment for colitis is typically an injection of cortisone, or the oral equivalent, prednisone. A special diet can also be helpful to maintain cats that have colitis. Usually, this would be a prescription diet that has the proteins already broken down into amino acids. That way, her intestines don't need to do as much work to digest her food.

Some cats do have an intolerance to specific food ingredients, and those cats can benefit from foods with alternative ingredients. You may want to talk to your vet about a different prescription food if this is suspected to be the case. Some foods have rabbit or duck as the protein source and sweet potatoes or peas for carbohydrates.

Good luck!

Jessica