Peer-reviewed veterinary case report
Male domestic shorthair cat with small testicles and baby teeth at 4
By Hug, Petra et al.·Published in Genes·2019·Institute of Genetics·View original on PubMed →
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Original publication title: AMissense Variant in a Domestic Shorthair Cat with Testicular Hypoplasia and Persistent Primary Dentition.
- Species:
- cat
Plain-English summary
A 4-year-old male domestic shorthair cat was brought in because he had not completed puberty and still had baby teeth. He was smaller than other cats his age and had testicular hypoplasia, meaning his testicles did not develop properly. Genetic testing revealed a specific variant in a gene related to sexual development, which may have caused his condition. Unfortunately, this cat's puberty was suppressed due to this genetic issue, and it is unclear if any treatments could help him develop normally.
People also search for: why is my cat not growing · cat testicular hypoplasia treatment · cat puberty problems
Abstract
A single male domestic shorthair cat that did not complete puberty was reported. At four years of age, it still had primary dentition, testicular hypoplasia, and was relatively small for its age. We hypothesized that the phenotype might have been due to an inherited form of hypogonadotropic hypogonadism (HH). We sequenced the genome of the affected cat and compared the data to 38 genomes from control cats. A search for private variants in 40 candidate genes associated with human HH revealed a single protein-changing variant in the affected cat. It was located in thegene encoding tachykinin 3, a precursor protein of the signaling molecule neurokinin B, which is known to play a role in sexual development.variants have been reported in human patients with HH. The identified feline variant,:c.220G>A or p.(Val74Met), affects a moderately conserved region of the precursor protein, 11 residues away from the mature neurokinin B sequence. The affected cat was homozygous for the mutant allele. In a cohort of 171 randomly sampled cats, 169 were homozygous for the wildtype allele and 2 were heterozygous. These data tentatively suggest that the identifiedvariant might have caused the suppression of puberty in the affected cat.
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Search related cases →Original publication on PubMed: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31615056/