Stem Cell Treatment and Ligaments.

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Sallioso

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My horse has damaged her front suspensory ligament in one leg. She has had box rest and was re-scanned today with no change. She has been injected with platelets today and has 8 weeks before being re-scanned. If there is no change, I am considering stem cell treatment. Does anyone have any experience of this good or bad? Or any advice? Thanks.
 
My Arab gelding did a very bad hind leg suspensory ligament injury (A hole as big as a golf ball) He is an Advanced Endurance horse and the vet did not expect him to ever compete again, but 10 months after doing the injury he competed in a 64k (40 miles) and did the ride very well.

He went down the lines of Shock Wave treatment and plasma injection.

He was in a small fenced off area in front of one of my stables (He does not do box rest) this area was increased each month until he had the whole yard.

With gentle walk exercise he came back into work.

We did not have to go down the Stem Cell treatment.

Good Luck
 
I think it's in the early stages of gathering statistical information to be able to properly assess the effectiveness of stem cell treatment. I don't think they use horse stem cells - I think someone said it was pig's, but I could be wrong. The only 2nd hand experience I've had of it was a friend's horse and it was a) very expensive and b) didn't work anyway. Good luck x
 
Theoretically stem cell treatment should benefit your horse,
Tendon fibres are originally lined up in a linear arrangment so they can stretch, when a tendon is damaged the scar tissue tendon grows back in 'criss-cross' arrangement, and therefore cannot stretch as well. Tendon tears occur when the tendon fibres are overstretched and eventually tear- linear fibres stretch much more then the scar tissue fibres. Stem cells regrow the tendon in the linear fibres as opposed to the scar tissue so the horse will have a much less chance of reinjury. It won't heal the horse faster but in the long run is much better and i would have it done if it was an option, it does depend on the area of the tear though- as stem cells need a pocket of fluid to 'stay in' and do their job. The stem cells are taken from the actual horse's bone marrow or fat cells then when injected into the area of damage, they differentiate.
 
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Hi

We tried stem cell treatment for my horses SDFT injury. They take the stem cells from the horses sternum (between front legs) under heavy sedation (not totally knocked out). They then send them off and they're cultured and when they've grown enough they re-inject into the injury.

In my horses case, the cells wouldn't grow in the lab which we put down to his age (22). The vets should explain this to you (it meant I still ended up paying for the extraction but the insurance paid it back even though the treatment had to be abandoned).

If I were you, I would try it.
 
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I should also add that my vets wanted to scan every 4 weeks for about 6 months after the injection of the cells to monitor progress and also to make sure nothing went wrong. So factor this into it when you're deciding as it means a lot of time and expense in follow-up. If in our case the treatment had been able to be undertaken in full, I would have argued for 6 weekly scans. We estimated it would all cost about £4k in total (for insurance purposes) including all the follow-up.

And I would ask your vets about their experience in doing this (my vets had only done it a handful of times before but if my pony was to be their first I'd have been concerned).

What made me smile was that the exercise program I was shown beforehand which we would have been due to commence ~8 weeks after re-injection took the horse up to 30 minutes of galloping a day (or something like that) which made me smile as it sounded like my horse would be better than before!!
 
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