White Cats With Blue Eyes Are Usually Deaf

An estimated 40 percent of white cats with blue eyes are deaf which is high.

White cats with blue eyes are usually deaf. The mech-anism of inheritance of deafness in white cats has not been. White cats generally have blue eyes or reddish eyes within the case of albinos. Richards J 1999.

Interestingly if a white cat with one blue eye is deaf in only one ear that ear will invariably be on the same side of the head as the blue eye. White cats with blue and green eyes deaf. Furthermore if a cat has one blue eye and one green the ear on the side of the blue eye is more likely to be deaf than the other.

The degeneration of the auditory apparatus near the ear cause deafness in the white cat. The common belief is that black and white cats are unique in that they have completely different-colored eyes. The notion that blue-eyed white cats are deaf comes from many cats with Waardenburg syndrome being solid white with blue eyes.

Some of these cats are deaf in only one ear. For those cats with other colored eyes only 10-20 are deaf. 40 percent of white cats with one blue eye were deaf.

So not all white cats are deaf and not all blue-eyed white cats are deaf but a great many of them are so-affected. Overall deaf cats with white coat colour and one or both blue eyes make up around about 1-15 of the total cat population. According to scientists a gene called W is responsible for a cats appearance white skin and white hair color.

Deafness is caused by an absence of a cell layer in the inner ear that originates from the same stem cells as well. Strangely blue eye white cats tend to be deaf even more than others. In odd-eyed white cats the ear on the blue-eyed side may be deaf but the one on the orange-eyed side usually has normal hearing.