Vitiligo?

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Marigold4

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One of my yearling fillies is losing the pigment around her right eye. Her left eye retains is natural colour, grey. The right one has been turning pink over the last 3 weeks. The vet saw it a couple of days ago and said it looked like she was losing her pigment.

Anyone had any luck reversing this? Internet suggest various things including vitamin A and copper.
 
Marigold4 said:
One of my yearling fillies is losing the pigment around her right eye. Her left eye retains is natural colour, grey. The right one has been turning pink over the last 3 weeks. The vet saw it a couple of days ago and said it looked like she was losing her pigment.

Anyone had any luck reversing this? Internet suggest various things including vitamin A and copper.
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I have had this on 2 young pb Arabs (chestnut so easy to see!). In both cases it was a mineral deficiency and glorious technicolor was restored with supplementation. A great many people told me it was just Arabian Fading syndrome/vitiligo etc. It is definitely worth considering mineral supplementation in my experience. A few months would tell you if that was the issue.
 
Thanks for replying. Do you remember which minerals you fed? I am thinking of adding copper but think I need to also do zinc with the copper?
 
Marigold4 said:
Thanks for this. I'll have a read. Did you feed anything different?
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I did give a couple of the copper syringes when he first had it but that certainly didn't make a quick difference so it is hard to tell if it had any impact at all. We've had a few yard moves so it is hard to know if anything triggered the pigment coming back. I think we are in a re-pigmenting phase now but I don't know how long it will last! He had bloods tested (unrelated) in Jan and in Feb and in March. Liver enzymes slightly raised in Jan, tried an over the counter liver supplement, still high in Feb so gave the vets liver tonic which is basically a very expensive vitamin supplement as far as I can tell plus vitamin E. At the end of March one liver enzyme (I forget which, sorry) was back to normal, AST still very slightly elevated but had come down. I've got no idea if any of this is related or not though!
 
palo1 said:
I have had this on 2 young pb Arabs (chestnut so easy to see!). In both cases it was a mineral deficiency and glorious technicolor was restored with supplementation. A great many people told me it was just Arabian Fading syndrome/vitiligo etc. It is definitely worth considering mineral supplementation in my experience. A few months would tell you if that was the issue.
Click to expand...
I went for a forage plus balancer option: with higher levels of zinc and copper as it was about impossible to persuade either horse to eat a more focussed zinc and copper addition. That resolved the issue over a few months and then we moved! No recurrence since and particularly on the one horse it would be very quickly noticeable.
 
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