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I went through this with my Serafina a few years ago. It could be a lot of things, but the most common are:
* parasites
* food allergy
* airborn allergy
* phychogenic alopecia
It could also be some other sort of medical issue that is causing it, where the cat knows he is sick, but doesn't know how else to deal with it than tearing out his fur.
Parasites and food allergies are the easiest to rule out, so usually checked first. For parasites they check then ski under a special light, do fecal tests etc. For food allergy, you have to change the food to a special limited ingredient food that contains none of the ingredients in their current diet, then keep with that diet for a couple of months (as I recall).
airborn allergies are tougher, although I recall some members saying that their vets were able to run various tests of allergies to various external things, and often times successfully identify common external things as causing the irritation.
Phychogenic alopecia is just sort of a miscellaeous bucket of things that get lumped together. I cynically think of it as the "we have no f**in clue" diagnosis, or the "we're too lazy to rule out the other things" diagnosis. But it can include things like stress. If you look at when the problem started, and can see any potential stressor that coincided with that (e.g., the addition or subtraction of a human family member, or pet family member, or a house move or some major, or even seemingly minor, change the living environment, like maybe a remodelling etc.), then that might reasonably be the cause.
Does your cat get doses of topical flea medication? That's one relatively common culprit that I ran across when trying to deal with this with my cat.
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The little monsters 3
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