High-pitched sounds can trigger seizures in cats

Common high-pitched sounds, such as crinkling tin foil and clinking of coins or keys, can cause your cat to suffer seizures, a new study has found.
Researchers from Davies Veterinary Specialists UK and the UCL School of Pharmacy, investigated and compiled a questionnaire for cat owners worldwide to complete.
They received hundreds of replies from across the globe from people who had noticed the same problem in their cats in response to certain types of sound.
These owners had also found that their local vets had no information at all about it, and often did not believe that a sound had triggered the seizure.

A research paper, published in the Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery, pulled together information from 96 of these cats, looking at the type and duration of seizure and the triggering sound.
It shows that some cats do indeed suffer from audiogenic reflex seizures - those which are consistently caused by sounds.

Certain sounds induced 'absences' (non-convulsive seizures), myoclonic seizures (brief, shock-like jerks of a muscle or a group of muscles), or generalised tonic-clonic seizures.
This last category is what most people think of as a 'seizure', with the cat losing consciousness and its body stiffening and jerking, often for several minutes.

The new syndrome has been termed feline audiogenic reflex seizures (FARS).
The investigation found that FARS occurred in pedigree and non-pedigree cats, but that among the pedigrees, the Birman breed was over-represented.
This is also a problem of older cats - the average age of seizure onset was 15 years, with cats ranging in age from 10 to 19 years.
The most commonly reported triggers for FARS were the sound of crinkling tin foil (82 cats), a metal spoon clanging in a ceramic feeding bowl (79 cats), chinking or tapping of glass (72 cats), crinkling of paper or plastic bags (71 cats), tapping on a computer keyboard or clicking of a mouse (61), clinking of coins or keys (59), hammering of a nail (38) and even the clicking of an owner's tongue (24).

Other, less common triggers were the sound of breaking the tin foil from packaging, mobile phone texting and ringing, digital alarms, Velcro, stove igniting ticks, running water, a dog jangling its collar as it scratched, computer printer, firewood splitting, wooden blocks being knocked together, walking across a wooden floor with bare feet or squeaky shoes and, in one case, the short, sharp scream of a young child.
Avoiding the sounds could reduce the seizures, although owners reported that it was sometimes difficult to avoid certain sounds, and the loudness of the sound also seemed to increase the severity of seizures, researchers said.