Sweeter dreams.

Epidural anesthesia means safer surgery for critically ill foals.

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


Critically ill foals with injuries requiring abdominal surgery don’t need more stress in their already weakened condition - but that’s exactly what they get with general anesthesia, currently the standard practice in most veterinary clinics. Specifically, the drugs used to produce anesthesia are taxing on a foal’s heart, and sometimes the effects are deadly.

Profs. Simon Pearce, Carolyn Kerr and Ludovic Bour? of the Department of Clini-cal Studies are trying to reduce the risks of performing emergency abdominal surgery on critically ill foals. They’re developing an epidural-sedative combination that will put less strain on the heart, while providing sedation and pain relief during surgery. This is similar to procedures in human hospitals, where epi-dural local anesthetics are used extensively in emergency rooms when immediate surgery is needed.

The researchers hope the new sedative combination, coupled with a laparoscopic sur-gery procedure (a minimally invasive technique using long instruments to enter the body), will improve recovery rates for the many foals admitted to the Ontario Veterinary College.

“This surgical-anesthesia package would result in less trauma during operations, smaller incisions, reduced recovery time and fewer post-surgical complications,” says Pearce. “The critically ill patients that are most at risk will benefit the greatest.”
Many of OVC’s emergency patients must be stabilized before it’s safe to operate, but time spent stabilizing means valuable operating time is lost. Patients can become even more ill in the interim. The epidural-sedation procedure, however, may decrease the time for stabilization because it affects the heart only minimally.

“We believe an epidural-sedative com-bination will improve many surgical proce-dures,” says Pearce. “By combining it with the minimally invasive laparoscopy, OVC will be providing the best surgical options to horse owners.”

Pearce has recently taken a position at the University of Sydney in Australia. The research team also includes graduate student Jennifer Lansdowne and undergraduate students Clair Windeyer, Angela Bolger and Joanna Coote. This project is sponsored by the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food.