Hoofcare & Lameness Presents World Horse Welfare's Laminitis Video Conference (Part 4: Measuring Invisble Body Fat Using Ultrasound to Accurately Determine Body Condition)

Welcome to the fourth in a series of feature presentations designed to help horse owners recognize the signs of laminitis in horses and to work toward preventing endocrine-related laminitis. In this video, laminitis researcher Alex Dugdale, currently at the University of Liverpool's Leverhulme Equine Hospital in Great Britain, talks about the subtleties and shortcomings of traditional body condition scoring.

For years, a simple visual evaluation of a horse has been used to determine a horse's relative body score, and this in turn was sufficient for a veterinarian to tell an owner if the horse might be at risk for laminitis and should be put on a weight management program and avoid excess grazing at high risk times.

But Dugdale is muddying that field considerably by suggesting that horses can appear to be slim--thus earning a mid-range or acceptable body score--but have large amounts of interior belly fat that may be making them susceptible to insulin resistance and, by extension, the potential complication of laminitis. Fat tissue can act almost like a gland in the way that it programs the body's reaction to nutritional stimuli, and reacts in particular to fluctuations of sugar-type nutrients in grasses and feed.

Simply put, some horses and ponies are just plain fat, while others show areas of fat in specific areas of their bodies that researchers have come to associate with a suspicion of equine metabolic syndrome. Now Dugdale is taking that regional adiposity a step further to include invisible fat.

Dugdale suggests using an ultrasound probe to scan a horse's belly lining  to see what sort of fat stores are laid down there. Unfortunately, the scan is not recorded on the video because of lighting problems, so this video is a bit incomplete.

To learn more about laminitis prevention: Watch Part 1 of the series, "The Horse's Foot and How It Goes Wrong" and then go on to Part 2, "Recognizing the Early Signs of Laminitis” and Part 3, Hoof Management and Pain Relief. This series was created by World Horse Welfare, a British charity that organized a series of horse owner conferences on laminitis with the support of Dodson and Horrell, a British feed company that is active in laminitis research.

More information about how to access body condition around the horse's girth is available in this article about laminitis prevention for horse owners on The Jurga Report.

© Fran Jurga and Hoofcare Publishing; Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog is a between-issues news service for subscribers to Hoofcare and Lameness Journal. Please, no use without permission. You only need to ask. This blog may be read online at the blog page, checked via RSS feed, or received via a digest-type email (requires signup in box at top right of blog page). To subscribe to Hoofcare and Lameness (the journal), please visit the main site, www.hoofcare.com, where many educational products and media related to equine lameness and hoof science can be found. Questions or problems with this blog? Send email to blog@hoofcare.com.
 

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Laminitis Prevention: Is Current Body Condition Scoring Irrelevant for Ponies?

by Fran Jurga | 18 September 2009 | Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog

A 9.2 hand, 12-year-old spotted pony named Firefly suffered from overgrown feet and laminitis in England in April 2007. She couldn't walk properly, but her owner refused to have her cared for, nor would she sign the pony over to the World Horse Welfare. A court case ensued and the owner lost her right to own horses for two years.

Here's Firefly in September 2007, on her way to full recovery and adoption to a new home. The research project funded by WHW at the University of Liverpool suggests that it is difficult to assign an objective body condition score to ponies using the system designed for larger horses.

Researchers at the department of clinical science at Britain's University of Liverpool, with support from the World Horse Welfare charity, presented new research at the annual convention of the British Equine Veterinary Association(BEVA) last week.

The question: how accurate is conventional equine body condition scoring for weight loss management when the equine being evaluated is an overweight pony?

The study, entitled Managed Weight Loss in Obese Ponies: Evaluating Weight Change, Health and Welfare, involved five mature, overweight or obese ponies and aimed to restrict their feed intake (on a dry matter basis) to 1% of body weight of a chaff-based complete diet for 12 weeks.

During this time the ponies' weight change, health parameters and behavior were monitored. All ponies remained healthy throughout the whole trial and an appropriate and safe rate of weight loss was achieved.

Clare Barfoot BSc (Hons) RNutr, registered nutritionist and the research and development manager for SPILLERS® (British horse feed company) explained: “Body weight decreased at a steady rate. However, despite significant weight loss, the body condition scores of the ponies didn't change. This highlights the concern that body condition scoring may not be the most effective way to monitor early weight loss in ponies.”

Even in this well-managed study, the feeding activity of the dieting ponies was decreased by 74 percent compared to ad libitum intake, highlighting the need for a practical feeding system that is both effective at managing weight loss but is sensitive to behavioral needs.

The WALTHAM® Equine Studies group was closely involved with this study as it has been with other groundbreaking work on equine obesity, such as showing that an obese body condition score was associated with increased insulin resistance back in 2003, and developing the cresty neck scoring system.

In response to the study, the research group is in the process of developing a new condition scoring system designed specifically for ponies. “This will involve validating the relationship between actual measurements of body fatness and the external appearance of the pony,” said Alex Dugdale, lead researcher for the study at Liverpool University.

Note: information provided by Spillers was used in the preparation of this blog post.


© Fran Jurga and Hoofcare Publishing. No use without permission. You only need to ask. Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog is a between-issues news service for subscribers to Hoofcare and Lameness Journal. This blog may be read online at the blog page, checked via RSS feed, or received via a digest-type email (requires signup in box at top right of blog page). To subscribe to Hoofcare and Lameness (the journal), please visit the main site, www.hoofcare.com, where many educational products and media related to equine lameness and hoof science can be found. Questions or problems with this blog? Send email to blog@hoofcare.com.