Page 54 - Barrel Stallion Register 2016

RESPIRATORY AIDS FOR HORSES
“There are many different products that can be used in a nebulizer, including steroids and nebulizer formulations and bromides, but we need to know what we are attacking and how to approach the individual problem.”
by Heather Smith Thomas
M a a n ny y h ho or r s s e e s s s s u u f f f f e e r r breathing prob- l le e m m s s a a n nd d a a i i r r w w a a y y
or lung impairments
d du u e e t t o o d du u s s t t , , a a l l l l e e r r g g i i e e s s , , o or r
d d i i s s e e a a s s e e . . J Ju u s s t t l l i i k k e e h hu u m m a a n n s s , ,
horses can sometimes
benefit from breathing aids
like nasal strips, inhal-
ers, and nebulizers. Dr.
Larry Overly, known to
most people as Dr. Rickey
(track veterinarian at Los Alamitos), says nasal strips
are obviously just an aid
for upper respiratory issues
to allow airflow to be maximized.
“By contrast, nebulizers and colloidal silver prod- ucts are utilized to deal with lower airway disease and inflammatory issues in the lungs (IAD - inflammatory airway disease). There are various ways we combat IAD, but first we need to find out what is actually causing the inflammation.” It is important to pinpoint the source rather than just treat the symptoms.
“Are we dealing with allergens or bacteria? These are questions that need to be answered when we
are trying to correct an issue. If a trainer is using a nebulizer or hiring someone like Ron Martin here at Los Alamitos to nebulize the horses, it’s just a blanket treatment that will probably help most of them. Obviously, these horses are staying in a stall at least 20 hours a day. They may be on the track or on the walker for a short time, but spend most of their time in a stall,” says Rickey.
We’ve taken the horse out of its natural envi- ronment and have created conditions that trigger inflammation. “There’s a lot of dust, mold and pollens associated with hay and bedding, and just the barn itself. The horse is breathing in a lot of allergens, spores, fungi, etc., and all of this will lead to some form of inflammation. Nebulizer treatments are a shotgun approach to try to take care of an underlying problem even if the trainer doesn’t know exactly what the problem is. The trainer is simply trying to head off that inflammation,” he explains.
“The hope is to give that athlete a chance for a better performance. This is an issue in Quarter Horse racing, now that we can’t use a beta-2 agonist. Before, it was a simpler management style just to place these horses on Ventipulmin or albuterol to try to mitigate
problems by using those products systemically. Ventipulmin has the ability to actually change the athlete, however, regarding repartitioning effects from the drug, as well. That’s the reason it can no longer
be used in racing. In order to address upper respira- tory issues, we have to look for other aids - whether steroids or colloidal silver products or the bromides or atropine (to stop bronchial spasms),” says Rickey.
“We need to look closely at what we are actually trying to take care of. A person can do a tracheal wash and get a histology report that gives a certain amount of information regarding the cells in the airways. You can also do the bronchial alveolar lavage (BAL) to get more information. Some horses with bronchial spasms can benefit from being on mast cell inhibitors. This can help subdue the response to all the allergens and changes in the lower airway,” he says.
“Every horse on the backside at a racetrack has a certain amount of inflammation in the lower airways and that’s the reason many trainers want to put all those horses on something like Ventipulmin. It’s
hard to say that the trainer is wrong, because he/she
is trying to take care of lower airway inflammation. The same thing can be said if you wanted to nebulize all your horses - with corticosteroids or one of the col- loidal silver products. More than likely, the horse will have some problem that the drug will help. You are likely to see some improvement and change the horse for the better, or it may have no effect.”
“Most of the time, I am called in when a horse is coughing or the trainer is hearing some upper airway noise when the horse is galloping. We find some fluid and mucus in the trachea, and we usually blindly treat those horses with antibiotics initially. If they don’t clear up, we do more diagnostics. My job as a scientist is to try to figure out exactly what is causing the problem, and then work from a scientific basis on how to fix that problem,” says Rickey.
“That’s not what we are doing when we just treat horses across the board with a nebulizer. That is basically assuming that all horses have some type of problem and we are going to attack it in this specific way, hoping that the treatment will benefit the horse,” he says.
Depending on the horse and its problems, some train- ers want to work with a veterinarian to get to the bottom
Dr. Larry Overly, known to most people as Dr. Rickey, is the track veterinarian at Los Alamitos Race Course
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SPEEDHORSE
EQUINE HEALTH