When a 3-month-old kitten developed diarrhea without an obvious cause for it, Dr. Kristin BeVirt Patneaude embraced her role as a medical detective to solve the mystery.  Baby Minnie was having six bowel movements a day, but she didn’t have parasites.  Probiotics, a prescription diet, diarrhea supplements and a prescription high-fiber diet all failed to reset her gastrointestinal system.

Two months of trial and error had not worked; her condition was rapidly becoming chronic.  Patneaude repeated tests for parasites, but they were all negative.  “Minnie’s lack of response to first-line medications and diets raised my concern that some other illness was the cause of her trouble,” she said.

The range of possibilities was fairly wide.  “Did she have food ingredient sensitivity, chronic viral infection, imbalance in her gut bacteria, deficiency in normal digestive enzymes or an overactive immune response in her intestinal tract?”  Patneaude pondered.  “There was no way to determine what was causing Minnie’s troubles without more testing, but I was becoming increasingly concerned her condition had lasted so long that she might also be developing a vitamin deficiency.”

Patneaude recommended a novel over-the-counter protein diet to see if Minnie’s diarrhea was a result of an allergy to proteins in her diet, but the improvement was minimal and temporary.  It was time to gear up for some intense detective work, although Patneaude opted to conduct her investigation without wearing the trench coat, dark glasses and the deerstalker hat Sherlock Holmes favored.  “Veterinarians often solve mysteries with blood work,” she said, “and I wanted to know if the kitten had vitamin or enzyme deficiencies, or if there was an overgrowth of bacteria in her intestinal tract.”

Minnie started a prescription hydrolyzed diet while everyone waited for test results.  “Thankfully, she liked the food, and it did help to get her bowel movements down from five to seven bowel movements a day, to two or three per day.”  Then the results from her bloodwork started to close in on the mystery.  They showed an imbalance in her gut flora. 

A microbiome analysis on her stool showed that she was missing many key bacteria found in healthy cat’s stool. “A consultation with the laboratory led to putting Minnie on oral capsules to transplant healthy microbes into her gut. This is called a fecal microbiota transplant (FMT) and is different from administering a probiotic. Because FMT capsules come from heathy, prescreened donor animals, they contain all the organisms healthy stool should contain. This includes many strains of bacteria, yeast and even viruses that make up a healthy microbiome.”

Minnie continued the allergy diet while receiving the FMT treatment, which over the course of three months resulted in the kitten having fewer bowel movements per day.  However, their consistency was still off, and tests showed she still lacked some of the healthy bacteria she needed.

Although she was slated to begin an herbal regimen, before that happened her stools suddenly became more normal.  “During the next two months, her humans weaned her off the FMT therapy, and she is now doing very well on the hydrolyzed diet alone,” said Patneaude.

“Minnie is such a great success story of how an integrative approach to care can reduce intestinal inflammation and microbiome imbalances. While there is certainly a place for stronger medications to sometimes correct these problems to gain control of disease, in Minnie’s case they were not. It did take time, patience and diligent pet parents, but because she was growing well, gaining weight and comfortable, we had the luxury of time to try a different approach.”

Even with her stellar detective work, Patneaude never determined what caused Minnie’s troubles in the first place.  “It’s possible that when Minnie was a small kitten before she was adopted, she developed some type of breakdown in the integrity of her intestinal lining from parasites, a viral infection, genetics or poor nutrition,” she said.

As Hippocrates said, “Let food be thy medicine, and medicine be thy food.

“He was likely very ahead of his time,” said Patneaude with a grin.

For more information or to make an appointment, call 414-421-1800 or visit greendalevillagevet.com.