Do White Cats With Blue Eyes Deaf

The uphill road to solving polygenic disorders The pure white cat with luminous blue eyes is an attrac-tive image familiar to many.

Do white cats with blue eyes deaf. Some people claim that 99 of blue-eyed white cats are deaf. Strain Louisiana State University. About half of all white cats have one or two blue eyes.

Older cats with the same eye color as humans may not be able to hear things very well when they are young and as they grow older they may not be able to do anything about it. As we have mentioned previously not all white cats with blue eyes are prone to deafness. The variable penetrance of deafness and eye colour may be caused by interplay with other genes andor environmental factors.

Dominant epistatic white is a masking gene that overrides all other coat colours and is symbolised with the letters W D. An estimated 40 percent of white cats with blue eyes are deaf which is high. Hereditary deafness is a major concern in white cats and even more so if one or both irises are blue in color.

Eye color in white cats also relates to the potential for deafness. As for odd-eyed white cats when a white cat has one orange or green and one blue eye the ear on the blue-eyed side is likely to be deaf whereas the one on the orange- or green-eyed side is usually fine. Deafness in white cats with blue eyes is a form of congenital deafness medically known as unilateral or bilateral congenital sensorineural deafness.

Thus deafness is strongly linked to the white coat colour and blue eye colour but not all white cats or white cats with blue eyes are necessarily deaf. First of all it can be said that not all white cats are deaf but they are more likely to be deaf since they carry the so-called gene W White of white in English especially those that have one eye of each color or blue eyes. About half of all white cats are deaf and those numbers increase in cats with blue eyes with deafness often found on the same side as the blue eye left blue eye deaf in left ear.

The reason as you may have guessed is heredity. The percentage rises to 40 percent if the cat has one blue eye while upwards of 65 to 85 percent of all-white cats with both eyes blue are deaf. Deafness in blue-eyed white cats.