"tension_on_the_wire" wrote in message
ups.com...
On Apr 4, 5:47 pm, "cindys" wrote:
She stopped purring several weeks before she died/we had her
euthanized. It does take energy for cats to purr, so when a cat stops
purring, it could be because the cat is weak/lacks the energy.

Everyone who has mentioned the loss of voice has also mentioned their
cat was found to be anemic.

When Molly lost her voice (meow), the vet did not do any bloodwork. She
simply gave Molly the corticosteroid injection empirically and told me to
phone her if I didn't see any improvement. If there were no improvement, her
plan was to look into Molly's throat under anesthesia. At the time, Molly
was still purring fine. Molly did get her voice back as result of the
injection, and she didn't have any blood work done (at that time), so there
is no way to know if she was anemic or not. The vet told me that during the
course of her career (around 25 years), she had only come across cats with
laryngitis three times before. In one situation, it had been a tumor. In
another situation, it was polyps on the vocal cords. In the third situation,
the cat died of another ailment before the cause of the laryngitis was
diagnosed. Molly never lost her purr until nearly a year later (shortly
before she died).

I wonder, since we still aren't one
hundred percent clear on the mechanism of purring, whether the anemia
makes it difficult to generate turbulence in the blood flow around the
vocal cords. Turbulence in the blood flow was proposed as one
possible mechanism for purring. Perhaps you need to have a minimum
hemoglobin level for good purring. Don't think that would apply to
meow-ing though.

But now you're saying that the anemia might be connected to inability to
purr, not inability to meow, whereas above you stated that everyone who
mentioned loss of voice (i.e. inability to meow) also mentioned that his/her
cat was anemic. So, I'm not sure what you're trying to say, but in the case
of my cat, inability to meow did not seem to be related to anemia (because
she got her voice back after the corticosteroid injection, which would not
have improved anemia, if she had it).. Inability to purr may have been
related to anemia, but it's hard to say in Molly's case because by the time
she stopped purring, she was already at the endstage of CRF and quite weak,
and we had her euthanized several weeks later. I do find it an interesting
theory, however, that inability to purr may be related to anemia. I wonder
if there has ever been any research done in this area.
Best regards,
---Cindy S.