annular ligament desmotomy?????

[skyejosh]

The daughter of the woman i work for has a pony which has had heat, swelling, slight lameness on and off in it's off fore for around a year. Now that the pony is much worse and practically unrideable she has finally taken the pony for an examination at the vets. After examining and nerve blocking the vet has said she is going to do an x-ray and scan next week but she is pretty certain that the problem is annular ligament desmotomy and she will need to have an operation to fix this. This wasn't something i was familiar with so have been looking for information online, most things i have read don't seem to be terribly positive about the succcess rate of the operation, does anyone have any experience of this issue and it's success or failure?

 

[star]

i think actually scientific papers report quite good success rates with this op. i was quoted 80% before my horse had it done. He was 20 when he had it done and he did come sound post-op but then re-injured it 6mths down the line. He had a further 18mths off and then came back into work for a couple more yrs. He flared it up again at the beginning of this year and it's been a bit on-off this yr but he's 25 now so only in v light work anyway.

 

[skyejosh]

Ok. The owner has been told it's 50 50 for the pony to be able to return to normal work. Maybe due to age and the work she was doing. She's 10 and has been doing pony club events, hunter trials and hunting. The article i had found online was saying 16 out of 24 that they had looked at had returned to some sort of work. But out of the 16, 5 had reinjured the same leg and had issues returning to work after the second episode. Thank You though. Hopefully she will be ok to do some light work at least.