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My senior cat's blood work is abnormal. What do these results mean?

Updated On September 23rd, 2025

Pet's info: Cat | American Shorthair | Male | neutered | 14 years and 9 months old | 12 lbs

My 15 year old male neutered cat has some abnormal blood work results. My vet won’t return my call to explain them to me. Monocytes 72.800% RDW 1.610 9/1 Platelets 0.430% Hematocrit 50.000fl

2 Answers

Most Helpful Answer

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Answered By Lauren Jones VMD

Veterinarian

Published on October 7th, 2021

Thank you for sending over the copies of Gonzie's blood work! Looking at the provided results, I see that his creatinine is a tiny bit elevated. This value increases with kidney damage or dehydration. I'd certainly recommend talking to his vet about rechecking his kidney function in a month or two, as well as running a urinalysis to see how well his kidneys are working to concentration his urine. The monocyte increase is extremely mild. I don't worry when this type of white blood cell increases a tiny bit while other white blood cell lines (especially the neutrophils and lymphocytes) are normal. Stress alone can trigger this minor elevation. The RDW helps to give the proportions of the red blood cells' size and volume. Again, this minor elevation does not seem to be significant. A 50% hematocrit is slightly elevated, which means that Gonzie has some extra red blood cells. I would much rather see too many red blood cells than too few! His blood volume could also be more concentrated if he's a bit dehydrated. Platelets can be challenging to read on CBCs since they can clump together, so the machine may read a clump of several platelets as just one single cell. In these cases, it's always useful to manually examine a blood smear under the microscope to determine if adequate numbers of platelets are present. Nothing on the provided lab work makes me terribly concerned at this moment, but I do think it's worth tracking his kidney values and confirming an accurate platelet count. I hope that everything goes well for Gonzie!

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Other Answers

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    Answered By Lauren Jones VMD

    Veterinarian

    Published on

    The challenge here is that every lab uses a slightly different reference range for what is "normal" based on how their machines are calibrated. As a result, I can't provide you with terribly accurate information based on these values alone without knowing what range this particular lab considers to be normal. If you have a copy of this CBC (complete blood count), please email it to customerservice@petcoach.com, and then I'll provide an updated answer with a bit more information. https://www.petcoach.co/article/blood-cells-complete-blood-counts-cbc-in-animals/

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