Today’s case is an 11 year old female neutered domestic short haired cat with episodes of coughing 10-15 times per day. Take a look at the case and post your comments!
Teaching and learning about veterinary diagnostic imaging.
Today’s case is an 11 year old female neutered domestic short haired cat with episodes of coughing 10-15 times per day. Take a look at the case and post your comments!
Three views are available for review. The patient is obese. There is a severe bronchial pattern throughout the lungs especially in the caudal lung lobes. There are multiple focal areas of more interstitial pattern in the cranial lung lobes. The cardiac silhouette and the pulmonary vasculature appear to be within normal limits.
The appearance of the lungs is suggestive of severe feline asthma, inflammatory lower airway disease including infectious or non infectious processes.
The owner declined advanced diagnostics. The cat improved on a 10-day course of doxycycline, but still coughs 1-2x/day. Prednisone did not seem to help the symptoms.
Enlarge the images to see the donuts and thickened bronchi. Chronic lower airway disease can be exacerbated by bacterial and mycoplasmal secondary infections, and antibiotic therapy can be helpful.
I thought there is pleural effusion.. so it’s just fat overlying ventral and cranial part of the thorax and cardiac silhouette? this is confusing
To be honest I thought so too about the pleural effusion although the location was unusual!
I was tossing up between it being fat or fluid – I could see the cat was overweight due to the SQ fat, but then the effacement of the cardiac silhouette (loss of detail of the ventral cardiac silhouette on the LLAT view, and also on the DV view?) caught me out since I thought fat didn’t usually efface the soft tissues as it is a different opacity? So I thought wrongly that it must be fluid.