Veterinary follow ups and success statistics

criso said:
I guess it depends on the type of procedure and nature of the condition. Papers I've seen on lameness studies talk about horses returning to full work or competitive career or only being used for light work/hacking when discussing outcomes.
Click to expand...

I think you'll find much of the research published is retrospective studies and the like. Obviously there are situations that the animals are purely research animals but there seems to be many more studies that are not based from my reading. Not everything is easy to mock up in a horse (ie different types of colic surgery to look at outcomes, you'd need a massive research herd to get any numbers at all). Have you got the numbers of horses that are used for research annually in the UK? Not that mice and the U.S. Laws don't matter but I'm not sure many equine vets will be quoting research from mouse studies as facts for equines.
 
rara007 said:
I think you'll find much of the research published is retrospective studies and the like. Obviously there are situations that the animals are purely research animals but there seems to be many more studies that are not based from my reading. Not everything is easy to mock up in a horse (ie different types of colic surgery to look at outcomes, you'd need a massive research herd to get any numbers at all). Have you got the numbers of horses that are used for research annually in the UK? Not that mice and the U.S. Laws don't matter but I'm not sure many equine vets will be quoting research from mouse studies as facts for equines.
Click to expand...

Was this reply meant for Applecart, I was suggesting that horses used in studies were probably privately owned and working animals not research subjects
 
Some is based from what vets are told at conferences. According to my vet this is unreliable as some vets don't admit to how many failures they have.
 
i agree, the Vets son't get to hear follow up's from owners if they have successfully come back into full work as mine did. Poor/guarded prognosis given so i often think I should call my Vet and the horspital and let them know that I didn't actually follow their advice but i have a sound horse.
 
rara007 said:
Yup! To applecart.
Click to expand...

Sorry Rara

this link explains how many animals are used for research but doesn't individually list horses. As I say I sit on the fence with this a bit in terms of animals used for experiments for drugs forhuman illnesses and disease. It would be nice to say no animals should be used full stop but then half the population wouldn't now be alive!

It would be interesting to find out about percentages for horses. Out of interest I will ask my vet next time I see him where they get their figures from as I'd like to know too. My horse was quoted as having a 40% reoccurence of his supsensory branch injury. Not happened yet, hopefuly won't happen at all. But again, same thing, I'd love to know where they get the percentages from. I look at it as 60% not going to happen myself.



http://www.understandinganimalresearch.org.uk/animals/types-animals/
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I found one of the research papers that I read when I was looking for chemical arthodesiss and I said on here that horses were used for experiments and then destroyed and people denied that this happens. Would just like to put the record straight that I wasn't making it up. I couldn't find the link at the time.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16649921
 
On the subject of follow-ups, I kept my vet at Leahurst updated at least annually right up until the week my girl was PTS, and then I emailed him to tell him what was going on and to thank him for all the years of support and advice he had given to me.

On the subject of use of animals in research, as someone else has pointed out, it is incredibly regulated. When you apply for research funding you have to justify every penny and animal use has to be kept to the absolute minimum and again the purchase of ever single one has to be justified. The success rate of research applications is less than 30%. Animals are generally bred specifically for the purpose, in exactly the same way that farm animals are, and although the University I work in doesn't have large animals, so I can't comment on that, a friend who works in the animal section says they are well cared for, treated kindly and with compassion and humanely destroyed (often they are under anaesthetic anyway) at the end. You couldn't possibly keep every single one at the end of the experiment (many have had surgery performed on them) because they wouldn't survive anyway. A great deal is done by computer modelling these days, so fewer animals are required. I don't particularly like the use of animals for experimentation, but so many medical conditions that are treatable today, wouldn't have been so. Is it worse than farming and slaughtering animals for meat, handbags, saddles and bridles???
 
soloequestrian said:
I asked my vet what the evidence was for efficacy of oil via stomach tube in an impacted colic. She looked at me as if I were mad. Vets are a bit like doctors sometimes, they don't necessarily work as scientists i.e. from evidence rather than from tradition. It's a shame, but presumably they just don't have time to do lots of follow-up work and analysis of data. Perhaps some nice projects there for all our final year equine students?
Click to expand...

I don't know about vets, but certainly within medicine it all has to come from an evidence base. I'm a medical student and everything we are taught is presented with the evidence base behind why we are doing it. There are a few things that used to be traditional, eg blood pressure but are still done because the subsequent studies provide an evidence base to show that it's useful/correct to do
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top