How to tell if your cat has asthma

Cats with asthma are frequently missed, because the main sign looks like something else. Owners describe it as the cat trying to bring up a hairball — a hunched posture, a dry retching cough, nothing produced.

That is often not a hairball. It is a cough.

What you are looking for

The Cornell Feline Health Center lists the signs as difficulty breathing, wheezing, rapid breathing, coughing or hacking, and open-mouth breathing. Vomiting sometimes happens alongside.

The posture is the tell. During an attack, cats hunch their body close to the ground and extend their necks forward. If your cat does that and produces a dry cough with nothing at the end of it, note when it happens and how often.

Presentation varies. Some cats have sudden respiratory crises. Others have a low-grade cough for months that never seems urgent enough to book an appointment for.

Who gets it

1–5%

of cats are affected

4–5 yrs

average age at diagnosis

No

single test can confirm it — diagnosis is by imaging and exclusion

Sex is not a factor. Some studies suggest Siamese cats may be predisposed, but Cornell says this remains unproven — so a non-Siamese cat with these signs should be taken just as seriously.

How a vet works it out

There is no single definitive test, which is why a phone description will not get you an answer.

Cornell lists chest radiographs, which can show a characteristic bright branching pattern in the airways; CT imaging; bronchoscopy, where the airways are looked at directly; and cytology, examining cells collected from the airway under a microscope.

Part of the work is exclusion. Chronic bronchitis, lungworms and pneumonia can all look similar and are treated differently — which is the main reason self-diagnosis from a video on the internet is a bad idea. Lungworm treated as asthma does not get better.

Treatment

The standard is corticosteroids to reduce inflammation in the lungs, with or without bronchodilators, given orally, by injection, or inhaled through a feline spacer and mask.

One detail worth knowing: bronchodilators alone are not effective. They open the airway but do nothing about the inflammation causing the problem, so a cat maintained on a reliever alone is being under-treated.

Asthma is often progressive, and Cornell is direct that cats cannot truly be cured of it. With monitoring and the right medication, they can live comfortably for years.

What to bring to the appointment

Vets rarely see the cough, because cats do not perform on demand in a consulting room.

Film it. A phone video of an episode — the posture, the sound, how long it lasts — is more useful than any description you can give. Note how often it happens, whether it is worse at particular times, and what is in the house: dust, smoke, aerosols, scented litter, a new cleaning product.