mindofavet

Having made up your mind something is amiss with the foal, where do you start?  A quick checklist of the most common problems follows (the executive summary if you like)... Differential diagnosis of the depressed neonate: Intrauterine growth retardation (IUGR) Compromised placental function on either the maternal or fetal side.  Nutrients and oxygen supplied to, and wastes removed from, both the fetus and the placenta are diminished. Intrauterine growth retardation (IUGR) results from the accumulation of cellular damage and derangements of endocrine, metabolic, and cardiovascular processes. Outcome is dependent on the severity and duration of changes, as well as the concurrent fetal developmental events. Hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy (HIE)/Perinatal asphyxia syndrome (PAS) Risk factors to the neonate as above. Oxygen and blood deprivation of the foal as a result of a difficult birth. Signs may take 1 to 2 days to become appar...

             A successful transition from the intrauterine to the extrauterine environment is the first challenge for the neonatal foal.  This may be complicated by events both before and during parturition.  Once exposed to the external environment, the neonate must rapidly develop normal behavior so as to associate with the mare; hit its targets for righting, standing and suckling; and develop defenses against a myriad of infectious challenges.  No small task for something a few hours old.  Puts us humans to shame really. Things go perfectly most of the time.  When they don’t, there’s people like me.  Signs of a problem may be subtle, but knowing what to look for helps.  Common presenting signs for the compromised neonate include depression, weakness, lack of suckle reflex, fever, sepsis, and neurological dysfunction. Prediction of the High Risk Neonate: the checklist Maternal ...

Not every pregnancy goes well.  There are plenty of potholes along the way, from the perils of conception and early embryonic development, all the way through to a fully developed fetus just waiting to be born.  Like any horse, they can fall at the final hurdle. Unlike in women, there is no ‘bed-rest’. You can’t say ‘OK love, just put your feet up and have a nice hot cup of tea’.  In reality, with a horse, the preferred option is to have all four feet firmly on the ground, at all times.  So if you’re worried about your mare, what can you do? Time to get your ducks in a row... Many institutions offer a ‘foal watch’ program.  Mares are hospitalized and put on a continuous watch with the whole team on stand-by ready to intervene if help is needed once foaling begins. When is this needed or wanted?  Usually, this is reserved for mares who have had problems before; sometimes the foal was lost during delivery.  Maybe assistance was needed to...

Further to my earlier posting, I got into a discussion a few nights back about a foal who with a modicum of investment on the owners part, and less sleep in the wee small hours on my part, would have a good shot of getting through and being a racehorse.  Like so many that come through it was a relatively common neonatal foal problem (there had been a dystocia and the foal was briefly oxygen deprived).  The foal was slowing down a bit and showing signs of hitting the skids for a few days.  The great majority of these do fine, we just have to steer the bus for them for a couple of days. The client was understandably frustrated, they thought they had something when the foal was born, and they saw it evaporating.   They were looking for help when they came in, but as with all of us, they didn’t want to spend money when they didn’t have to or when it wasn’t going to pan out.   I get that. We are not going to save every foal, some are just too broken when we...

A question we are often asked is ‘…what is the prognosis for the foal?...’   Sometimes that’s easy to answer, most of the time it’s difficult.   There are some things that can help though. There have been a lot of studies done at university level to try and shed light on this issue.   A lot of the time, the things found to be good indicators of survival when foals first arrived at the hospital were difficult to measure in the field, didn’t mean the same things in other locations, and sometimes weren’t repeatable between different years even in the same hospital.   This can make things really difficult when estimating a prognosis, especially before very much information can be gathered and laboratory results reported.   Often, we are using history to predict the future…we ask ourselves this: the last time I saw one of these, how did it go?   There’s nothing wrong with that, we base many of our decisions on the lessons learned at the School of ...