Page 139 - Speedhorse February 2018

of her and was able to transfer it successfully and end up with a pregnancy. “We could breed this mare to carry a foal or continue to flush embryos out of her and all those aspirations have not affected her fertility at all. That was one of the main reasons we kept doing that mare and ended up with a bunch of babies, just as a test to see what would happen if we did an extreme number of aspirations. I doubt anyone would actually want to do a mare
this often. We just did this as a test. We had another really nice Quarter Horse mare here this year that we did 13 times and then flushed an embryo out of her late this fall,” says Beck. The aspirations did not affect her ability to produce a normal embryo.
“To address the issue of safety, we also went back through all our records. Some of our clients want to do an ICSI procedure to get a foal and then they want to breed their mare to some other stallion, flush out an embryo and then breed her to yet a third stallion to carry
a foal. We often do several procedures on the same mare. We always do the ICSI first, then the others can follow and the last thing we do is breed her to carry the foal herself,” he says. Harvesting eggs for the ICSI process is always done early in the year so the mare can have the other procedures done soon after
and so she will foal early. Then after she foals, the procedure can all be done again the next year. “We have 27 mares in our little study that we have aspirated for the ICSI procedure at least once. Many of them were aspirated more than once, but some were done just
once if it worked the first time. All of these mares were subsequently bred and flushed for embryos or bred to carry. Embryo recovery and pregnancies were normal or above normal and nearly all of them were successful after the ICSI procedure. We wrote up this study and will probably submit this paper to a scientific publication,” Beck says.
Safety will always be an issue that people worry about. “Whenever new procedures are being done and people start talking about it, there is often a lot of false information that gets generated on the gossip line. You hear stories about things such as ICSI will ruin your mare,” he says. This is one reason Beck tried these procedures on his own mares, to be sure they stayed fertile.
“Since we started doing ICSI in 2006, we have done about 2,000 aspirations. The biggest concern is fertility and after having done many of my own mares many times, I am confident that it does not affect fertility. We originally started doing ICSI in recipient mares, as a
test, because we have a big herd of recipients. We did several hundred mares before we ever did a client’s mare or even one of my own valuable mares. I wanted to be confident
that we weren’t going to hurt any mares. We aspirated mares for five years before we offered this commercially to the public after I was convinced that it was safe and we could get consistent results,” he says.
Another issue of concern is complications from the procedure. “If you poke a needle
in there, people worry that it might ruin the ovary, but it does not. Other questions are what if she bleeds to death, or gets an infection in her ovary, or gets peritonitis, or any of the other possible complications. These are legiti- mate questions because you don’t want any mare dying. After 2000 aspirations, knock on wood, we haven’t had any of these problems,” says Beck.
All of the mares are monitored closely. “Originally when we first started doing this, we would bring the mare back in late in the afternoon to be ultra-sounded to make sure she was not hemorrhaging and then we’d check her again the next day. We finally got tired of doing that because none of them were bleeding. We’ve never had a bleeder. Some of them will get a hematoma on the ovary, but it never gets much bigger than what is called a corpus hemorrhagicum, which is a blood clot that occasionally occurs naturally when a mare ovulates,” he explains.
Ovulation sometimes breaks a little blood vessel, creating a small blood clot on the ovary after ovulation. “Everyone who does repro- ductive work has seen a lot of these and they resolve naturally. The worst thing we see, in terms of hemorrhage with an aspiration, is
Harvesting the immature oocytes for the ICSI process is typically done early in the year.
Then, the mare can have other procedures done soon after, such as being bred to another stallion to flush out an embryo or to carry a foal so she will foal early.
exactly the same thing that can occur natu- rally,” he says.
“We’ve never had a mare get infected and never had peritonitis or any other complica- tion from the procedure. We are very careful every time and go to great lengths to make sure everything is sterile. The mare is sedated and we try to keep her as still as possible while we are manipulating the needle in her ovary,” says Beck.
They had one mare last year that came right off the race track and was hyper excit- able. “She was high as a kite when she got off the van. We tried to sedate her and get her into the chute to get her ready, but she would never calm down. We gave her a lot of drugs, but
Embryo recovery and pregnancies are normal and nearly all successful after Dr. Beck’s ICSI procedure.
SPEEDHORSE, February 2018 137
equine health