Copper irides (irises) in cats with shunts
A few photos of cats with the ‘classic’ copper-coloured irides often associated with portosystemic shunts.
It was reported to me just recently that at least one of these cats developed the coppering in the period between 3 and 5 months old.
…and sometimes they don’t have copper irides:
Is the cats pupil with liver shunt always dilated?
Hi Therese, no, on the whole a shunt shouldn’t affect pupil size. Severe hepatic encephalopathy may be associated with slow pupillary responses but altered pupil size isn’t a consistent feature of shunts generally.
Hi there! I’m curious if there is a change of colour a served after a corrective surgery done on a portosystemic shunt. If a cats irides have coppered, are they expected to change back to their original colour?
At least in some cats they do go back to more normal colour, yes.
At what age do symptoms appear in a kitten with shunts? My kitten is four months old and isn’t gaining weight. She’s tiny and has high energy She has copper colored eyes.
From weaning or soon thereafter usually. Although sometimes they’re quite vague and just flare up intermittently.
I looked all over the web for before/after photos showing the color change and never found any. I was interested because our copper-eyed boy had liver-shunt surgery (and I was doing a LOT of reading while we waited for our surgery date and for our first post-op bile acids).
Well, I was able to provide some myself! I take a lot of pictures anyway, so we knew we’d be able to track it. I wrote a little blog post about it and posted before and after pictures here: https://caitlinburke.com/blog/2023/05/05/our-little-medical-marvel/ His regular veterinarian and the surgery team were pretty excited to see this in one of their own patients 🙂
amazing! many thanks for posting…that’s really cool 🙂