I've had a cat with Stomatitis for over a year. How often does a cat have flair ups & what treatment is used?

Question

A year ago, I adopted a very sick sphinx, she was nearly dead and skin and bones. All her teeth were rotted and had to be pulled and then I found she has stomatitis. At first I had to get her steroid shots every other week. Now she only has a flair up (drooling, lethargic, not eating) every 8 weeks or so. Has anyone else had any treatment for their cat that has worked for them? She looks 100% better than when I first got her, but these episodes are terrible for her.

Thank you! I will take all this information to my vet. He is very interested in treating my cat and open to any suggestions. I will visit all the sites and research it. I now know a lot more than I did!

Answer 1

Stomatitis is a symptom (it means inflammation of the mouth) not a disease.

Steroids only work for a while, and they have side-effects.

I suggest you take the cat to a different vet for a second opinion. Ask him to test the cat for Calici virus and for Bartonella. Both those diseases cause the symptoms you listed and can be controlled, if not cured, with the right antibiotics.

Also, the same gene which cause defective fur formation in Sphinx cats also causes defective tooth formation. If her teeth have not been pulled, doing so may help her general health.

Thanks for trying to help her. Unfortunately cats like her are the down side of efforts to breed "exotic" animals that are far from the way nature designed them to look.

Answer 2

I don't doubt that they are painful, stomatitis is awful.

Since her teeth were pulled, at least that factor doesn't have to be worried about. There's two FIV cat lists on yahoo groups that talk about stomatitis quite often, they've got a lot of experience with it.

We had a minor bout with it--our vet was part of a research study and they were finding that a LOT of the stomatitis cats tested postiive for feline bartonella (which is spread by fleas, the cat gets it, harbors it, but doesn't show any problem till their immune system gets too run down, then the mouth problems start.

The GOOD thing is that if it is bartonella, it's treatable 90% of the time with an antibiotic. We had ours on the antibiotic and he was cleared up completely. The antibiotic is given for 21 days and it's got a short shelf life, but it worked wonderful for us.

Oh, the vet said they'd found a correlation of bartonella in 3 out of every 4 cats they saw with horrible mouth problems. She was part of the national study, so I was hearing about the findings before they were showing up in the literature.

You can have your vet check for this--it sure couldn't hurt!

Answer 3

My Toy Poodle deveoped it, at about 3yrs of age. At first, the stupid vet I went to (who no longer even works there), didn't know what the heck it was, her breath smelled like rotting flesh even though I had always brushed her teeth. Turns out, she had "extra teeth," that I wasn't reaching and they had developed plaque. She had to have several teeth pulled, he broke one off and put stitches in=$1500 down the hole, since she continued to have an "off odor," that I detected (nothing like what happened before), so 6mos later, another $3000 to the "vet specialty"/rip-off hospital for ANOTHER "cleaning" (that she didn't need, since I'd continued brushing and to have the rest of the tooth removed. Although I kept up with brushing, she again required another cleaning about 2yrs ago and even so, last year started developing an "off odor," again. I was able to keep it under control myself by using an esterfied fatty acid product, specifically made for stomatitis--I'm using it on her & my other 2 dogs and cat every few days now, giving her a pet plaque product made of kelp and an oral gel pet product (advertised as "no brushing required) along with vanilla pet toothpaste, for daily brushing. So far so good. The esterfied fatty acid has kept her from having any more flare-ups and I think I've finally found a solution for keeping the plaque off of her remaining teeth.
The last time (2yrs ago) when I had to take her in for a cleaning and a couple of teeth pulled, my vet was VERY impressed with both the way I have been able to keep this horrifying disease under control and with how healthy my dog looks. Hope this helps someone else.

Answer 4

I have no experience with this, but I dug up some sites which may be of help to you.

If I were you, I'd look for a holistic vet. It's possible they can recommend a different course of treatement, one that will be more natural and healthier for your kitty.

There are also some groups you can join. You'll find others whose cats have the same condition and may learn quite a bit more about it and about treatement.

Good luck!