Numbing sooner.

Epidural treatments are effective for short-term injuries.

An article by Clare Illingworth, SPARK writer, University of Guelph.


When short-term injuries make a horse go lame, it’s sometimes the treatment - not the injury - that’s the biggest challenge. Commonly used analgesics (painkillers) need to be administered frequently, and they’re often ineffective at eliminating the hurt. In fact, some make things worse, even causing serious digestive problems.

Profs. Carolyn Kerr and Simon Pearce, Clinical Studies, want to see if epidural drugs could replace the analgesics currently used to treat equine lameness. They’re studying how analge-sics administered epidurally can improve pain management for short-term injuries, alleviate painful re-coveries and prevent secondary stress injuries to the supporting limb.

“Effective pain management is an important aspect of recovery in equine medicine,” says Kerr. “Many horses that are treated for severe lameness will often injure the supporting limb, making the healing process difficult. Epidural drugs are more efficient than current methods and may allow horses that would otherwise be destroyed to recover from injury.” She says epidural drugs may be more efficacious and horses may suffer fewer side-effects.

The researchers studied the response to the painkillers by applying a special horse shoe that creates a pressure lameness. It makes horses feel like there’s a pebble stuck in their shoe, so they don’t put as much weight on it. The researchers used video equipment to record 43 horses jogging normally, with the pressure and with a pressure/epidural combination. The videos were then randomized and the animals judged for their degree of lameness.

Initial results have found that epidural drugs effectively manage acute pain, and they’ve been used safely for as long as 25 days, says Kerr. “Epidural analge-sia will provide a second option for many critically ill horses that is less invasive and involves fewer risks than current drugs do.”

This research was sponsored by the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food and the E.P. Taylor Equine Research Fund.