Hyperesthesia

My cat started chasing his own tail then running away from it. He then started to attack his tail and his back twitches. Vet gave him a thorough check over and a steroid injection, which made no difference. What can I do to help him please? 4 in June. Healthy and upto date with everything.

Hello - it is unusual nowadays to give steroids as a first line treatment without a diagnosis, particularly in light of side-effects from steroid injections, so I wonder whether there might be something I am missing about this case from the history.  I cannot, from your description alone, exclude your cats' behaviour being normal play behaviour, or a response to parasites, or to pain, or indeed a neurological change. It is often difficult to spot signs of pain in cats - they are independent creatures in the wild and there is little evolutionary advantage to a cat of signalling pain to other cats, as dogs will.  If a cat is in pain, they therefore tend to hide it. So some cases like this might benefit from long courses of licensed pain releif, acupuncture, or even imaging of any problem areas, depending where any pain might be originating.  However, as you say, pain is only one possibility. I wonder what your vets' intention was if the steroid seemed ineffective?  I wonder what is left on their differentials list, what they think could be causing this and how they could go about ruling other possibilities out?  If they do run out of ideas, I wonder whether there are feline medical experts locally to whom this case can be referred.  Good questions are always 'what differentials do you think could be causing this' and 'what do you need to do in order to properly rule X out?'  We wish you all the best with this fascinating case.

Thank you so much. No previous issues at all and I will speak to my vet again. Really don’t want to put Casper through loads of tests if I can help it Ashe is very skitty around strangers.