Ahead by a leg.

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New hope for healing stubborn equine injuries? An article by Kirsten Graham.

Recovery is tough for horses with leg injuries, even after veterinarian intervention such as orthopedic surgery. Injuries won’t heal properly if bacteria are present in wounds, so veterinarians usually try to prevent infections by using antibiotics. But that can be more difficult than it sounds. Now, a Guelph researcher has adopted a variation on a traditional antibiotic therapy technique used for treating such injuries, and he hopes its use will help improve that historically poor prognosis.

Prof. Ludovic Bour? and graduate stu-dent Shawn Mattson of the Department of Clinical Studies are helping to improve the outcome of equine orthopedic surgery with something called intraosseus antibiotic injection, a procedure for treating bacterial infections locally in healing joints, tendons and fracture sites. In this procedure, antibiotics are given directly to the injury site, bypassing the rest of the body. The key is to use a high concen-tration of antibiotic and keep it in a localized area. This process has the potential to kill all the bacteria present in the wound.

“The orthopedic prognosis that follows these surgeries is often poor,” says Mattson, “but the use of intraosseus antibiotic injection may increase the odds of a horse recovering faster and fully.”

Currently, veterinarians sometimes use a technique called regional limb perfusion, in which antibiotic treatments are administered in the vein of the affected leg daily for up to two weeks following surgery. But if the horse’s leg begins to swell — a common complication following surgery — treatment becomes more difficult. That’s because vets administering the antibiotics inject them into a blood vessel. And with the horse’s swollen leg, that’s no easy feat, especially when the animal becomes more stressed with each attempt.

Intraosseus antibiotic injection elimi-nates this problem. Instead of locating a vein each time, Mattson creates a temporary access point for use throughout the duration of antibiotic treatment. During the operation to repair the injury, he places a hollow screw directly into the damaged bone tissue. That way, antibiotics can easily be administered straight into the site while causing little dis-tress to the horse and minimal difficulty for the veterinary intervention.

“The ability to keep large doses of anti-biotics in one area means the drug concen-tration remains high in the healing tissue, where it’s needed most,” he says.

The intraosseus injection technique was originally developed in the 1970s for the treatment of cancer in humans. It hasn’t been used extensively in veterinary medi-cine, but Mattson hopes his research will result in the technique becoming more commonplace in equine practice.

This research was sponsored by the Ontario Horse Racing Industry Association.