Liver Enzyme saga, please help!

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Monkers

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Wits end doesn't come close!

If anyone has a similar experience or can shed any light onto my problem, I would be most grateful. Vets at the moment are scratching their heads. I will keep it brief.......

Last october, 2 horses blood tested - both showed raised lier enzymes.
Rest of yard tested, all fine,

All horses changed fields to remove them from a "suspect" pasture

By December 80% of horses had raised enzymes.

All horses removed from all pastures and from the current hay source.
One group of horses fed hay grown 2 miles away
one group of horses fed hay from 30 miles away.
one group of horses fed mycotoxin screened hay from the south of France.
All horses fed mycosorb, a mycotoxin binder
All horses on different hard feeds from different manufacturers

All horses got worse despite removal from pasture and initial hay source.

Tests on pasture and on hay showed very little mycotoxin contamination.

Three horses given prednisolone at 1mg per kilo. Worse after 4 weeks
Same three horses given 2mg per kilo of pred. Worse after another 4 weeks.

Two older horses showing some spontaneous improvement but most recent set of bloods show a slight worsening again in one of them.

Horses have been back out on the pasture for 3 weeks as there is fresh growth for them.

All water pipes and troughs are new and are direct from the mains

No ragwort or other poisonous plants

Bacterial infection has been ruled out

Parasites considered but not thought to be the cause. Liver fluke highly unlikely but can't be completely ruled out.

Biopsy on 2 horses, inconclusive, but no fibrosis, livers look normal in the scan.

All horses well, putting on weight with the grass with normal healthy appetites. No outward signs of illness.

Only 3 horses did not become ill. One was on box rest with no contact with any other horses or the paddocks. Two were in a field on their own. They could sniff the affected animals over the fence but had their own water supply.
All affected animals mixed either directly or indirectly.

Viral hepatitis not thought to exist in horses!

Does anyone have any idea what is wrong with my horses?
 
No idea! But my mare had high liver enzymes and ended up with an impaction colic, the scans/bloods showed her liver was swollen/inflamed.
Still no idea on the cause, but since putting her on milk thistle and she's had regular blood tests and is getting better. She's put the weight back on and is getting back to herself :)

I know how frustrating it is! Just keep checking everything out, I know the cause of my mares problems now .. Sadly it was a "horse lover" with a grudge :mad:
 
Eta - not one other horse on either of the yards (I moved a few months before I discovered the liver problems) were affected. Just her :(
 
My mare a couple years ago had a blood test done as she had swelling in her jaw. I opted for the bloods mainly to give my mare a clean bill of health as everyone told me she was fine, but I had a niggle something was wrong.
She looked perfectly healthy and held her weight but The bloods came back with high muscle enzymes and high liver enzymes. She was taken off her field and put on box rest and was allowed out in a tiny starvation paddock for a few hrs and things started to settle down. She had repeat bloods every month for 6 months and during that time her liver enzymes started to go down and then started going back up again. Her muscle enzymes returned to normal within the first 3 weeks. Then in that Nov she was given a liver biopsy and scan. The scan was alomost normal (very slight edge on liver) and the biopsy was normal.
After the first blood test she was put on a low protein (high quality) diet and after the biopsy she was given Legaphyton. After 2 months on the supplement she was given another test and the enzymes were back to normal perimeters. She was then retested again in a few months and it came back and said her muscle enzymes were raised and liver enzymes had gone up slightly. She was then given another blood test in Oct which has showed that her liver emzymes have gone up over normal perimeters but werent too bad and we will need to keep and eye on them.

We have no idea what causes it and we just have to monitor her. At the end of the month she is due to get another set of bloods pulled and see how they look as we have moved yards in the last 2 months to see if it is something at the old yard that is causing it. She currently looks the best she has for over a year.

Sorry I cant help you any more but thought you may like to know others are in the same position as yourself. All my mares results etc have been passed on to a local vet hospital and they cant help but keep an eye on things too.

forgot to say that only 1 other horse had liver issues at the yard but there's was caused by some kind of virus. There results are now all back to normal and have been for some time.
 
My gang of 6 ponies developed liver problems in June 2012 after 2 months on high level selenium supplementation (total of 3.6mg per day, deliberately above maintenance levels, and inline with a published study, to address muscle problems) and a new balancer which had high zinc and copper.

Several months later, one of the ponies tested positive on a poo sample for liver fluke. Only 1 egg was found in 3g of poo. I've since read that horses tend to shed very few fluke eggs. Cattle may have hundreds of eggs per gram of poo, and sheep can have thousands of eggs per gram of poo.

On the basis of that result, all ponies were dosed with fasinex 100, as per David Sutton's advice from Glasgow University who has an interest in the increase in liver fluke being seen in horses. At the following blood test, all ponies showed improvement in liver enzymes (the worst had had a GGT of up to 2,300), and since then all have come back to normal range, except the worst pony who is only slightly above normal now (GGT around 90, instead of under 45....... but it's a huge improvement from 2,300).

I was very surprised by the fluke result. My land isn't typically flukey land at all, and the land isn't grazed by cattle or sheep, although there are cattle and sheep on adjoining land. Also, during 2012 one of my ponies did not have access to grass except for about a week or so in spring (she was laminitic), and she showed the same liver problems as the others, so goodness knows whether it really was fluke in all of them or whether it was the unusual diet or what.

Hope you find a way forward with yours.

Sarah
 
I have been reading of quite a few horses treated for liver fluke with success over the past couple of years.

ps. I wonder if the increasingly wet weather is a factor?
 
Thanks all for the replies.
Our next step is to turn the horses out 24 hours a day on fresh pasture with new growth and not to feed any hay at all. The vets are still leaning towards it being an ingested toxin despite all the control measures we introduced. I have to say I agree with them in principle but it does seem unlikely given I have already changed forage with no improvement at all.

Today my worm count lady did a fluke test and she found one very odd shaped egg similar to a fluke egg but she could not definatively say that it was one. She did say that in 15 years she had never seen anything like it.

More poo off for testing next week!
 
Yes, absolutely. It makes more sense to me to do the fluke worming first I think. I will see what the vet says.
 
OP until you have the problem resolved, I'd feed a diet to support the liver: very low protein, what protein you do feed to be the highest quality you can afford, milk thistle, Yea Sac, no daytime turnout. Apologies if you're doing this already. Prof Derek Knottenbelt of Liverpool University is a world expert on liver disease in horses and will always respond to enquiries from lay horse owners. He's knotty@liverpool.ac.uk and is brilliant. He helped me enormously when I took on a ragwort poisoned rescue gypsy cob. He replied to my desperate e-mail from Sweden where he was on a lecture tour! Good luck and please let us know the outcome. I'd be leaning towards environmental toxin too.
 
Thanks box of frogs I will email him. I didn't think I could contact him directly, so that could well be useful.
Amage, do you know how I could test the water and what I would be testing it for? Us humans are drinking the same water so my theory is that we would all be ill too!
 
Monkers said:
Thanks box of frogs I will email him. I didn't think I could contact him directly, so that could well be useful.
Amage, do you know how I could test the water and what I would be testing it for? Us humans are drinking the same water so my theory is that we would all be ill too!
Click to expand...

Your local Agri place should be ale to recommend somewhere that will test the water for you. A full analysis including pH, nitrates, cfus etc. you may be drinking the same water but not from the same source ie the troughs. Have seen so many health issues related to water particularly with Concrete troughs. What material are your troughs made of?
 
The troughs are galvanised steel, but they were confined to their boxes for over 3 months and they had plastic buckets.
 
Amage,

what health problems have you seen caused by concrete troughs, please, and how were you able to confirm that the problem was caused by the material that the trough was made from?

Thanks.

Sarah
 
flintfootfilly said:
Amage,

what health problems have you seen caused by concrete troughs, please, and how were you able to confirm that the problem was caused by the material that the trough was made from?

Thanks.

Sarah
Click to expand...

Apologies Sarah you seem to have taken me up wrong it is not the specific material that causes illness. Issue with concrete troughs is related to the older style rougher concrete rather than the smooth concrete type. Because of the rough surface it is impossible to get them really really clean and they can be a haven for bacteria and nasties. Particularly with animals out 24/7 with this as their only source of water there can be a variety of problems from stomach upsets, infections, poor coat & skin health or simple dehydration due to not drinking. Cows can also suffer issues due to this and it is in cows I first really became aware of the issues.. Water can appear clean & fresh but can be getting contaminated in the trough. We have sampled water from source and various different troughs and the difference in CFU's (Coliform Forming Units) from source to the troughs can be incredible, specifically in the case of the porous rough surface concrete troughs.
 
Thanks Amage, that's really interesting to know, and I guess it makes good sense that a rough surface is going to be more difficult to clean effectively.

Have never measured (or even thought of cfu's, so again it's very interesting to hear of that being measured.

Thanks again.

Sarah
 
Beausmate said:
Is your water supply direct from mains or does some of it come via a header tank?
Click to expand...

Its all direct from the mains. In the last 20 years all the pipe work has been replaced from the meter to our property with modern plastic pipes. About 3 years ago we installed automatic troughs in the fields again all with plastic pipes. The horses in effect drink the same water as we do.
I will look into getting it tested though. I can't help thinking if it was the water then the people would have got sick long before the horses being so much smaller in size.
 
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