Originally Answered: Young cat has hacking cough - what can it be?
Hi @3cats,
There are a couple of possibilities that spring to mind. One is a persistent foreign body (usually a blade of grass) stuck at the back of the throat. It's likely your vet checked for this when they took the x-rays, but it's worth checking. This usually causes sneezing, gulping, or running noses as well, although could happen with just a cough.
Whilst heart disease can cause a cough in cats, I would expect it to have other signs too like breathlessness or lethargy. Having said that, cats are excellent at hiding the signs and simply listening to the heart and taking chest x-rays wouldn't completely rule out heart disease - I'd want a cardiologist to do an echo (an ultrasound of the heart) to check it first!
However, my top differential at this point, in a young and otherwise healthy cat, is some sort of allergic reaction. These can be tricky to diagnose in cats and an internal medicine specialist might be your best bet of getting an answer. It's worth doing though - these allergies can progress and scary, acute episodes of poor breathing (feline asthma) can occur, requiring emergency hospitalisation. So getting to the bottom of it whilst it's just a cough is a good idea!
I hope that's given you some ideas. To summarise, there are a few more options for diagnostics, but if your vet doesn't have access to the equipment or isn't confident with diagnosing these diseases, a referral to an internal medicine specialist is absolutely fine too!
Good luck!
