Equine asthma treatment study underwayApril 22, 2019Having already invented a means of diagnosing equine asthma, a professor at Purdue's College of Veterinary Medicine is focusing his attention on treating horses with the condition. Laurent Couëtil, DVM, PhD, professor of large animal internal medicine, director of Purdue University's Equine Sports Medicine Center, has spent majority of his career treating and researching equine asthma. "Milder equine asthma has been difficult to detect because horses don't necessarily show many signs besides the fact they're not performing well," says Dr. Couëtil. "Some of them cough once in a while, but it isn't crippling them. Now that we have the tools to look for it, we realize it's very common." "In humans, the most common test performed to test for asthma is forced exhalation. The nurse trains you to take in the deepest breath possible and blow out as hard as you can. This is easy for people because we can follow instructions, but you can't tell a horse to do that, so I worked with Purdue engineers to develop a pulmonary function test for horses." Corticosteroids are typically used to treat equine asthma; however, they come with a risk of drug violations in racehorses, suppress the horse's immune system, and …
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UF studies anesthetic with potential for misuse in racehorsesApril 16, 2019A local anesthetic with the potential for misuse in racehorses is being studied by veterinarians at the University of Florida (UF) College of Veterinary Medicine in collaboration with UF Racing Laboratory. The study will observe bupivacaine as there are concerns the extended release form of the drug could be used unethically to mask pain or an injury in a racehorse. "Bupivacaine has been around for a while," says Taralyn McCarrel, DVM, an equine surgeon and the grant's principal investigator. "We don't use it a lot, as most of the time we're doing very short procedures and for those, we tend to use drugs that are shorter-acting. This is true also when we're using them in a lameness examination. We only need the drugs to last a few hours in most cases." "In this new formulation, tiny droplets of bupivacaine are wrapped in a membrane, which is the liposomal component. After injection, the liposomes start to break down, and gradually release these small pockets of drug over a long time." The research team will start by determining the minimal effective dose to block pain in a horse's foot and to assess how long the anesthetic effect lasts. They will then …
