Would you have a try?new cure?

[_daisy_]

just been reading Your Horse magazine and came accross a very interesting item.
<span style="color:red"> IRAP </span> - has anyone heard of it or has used it on their horse?
Well it claims that it is a revolutionary new treatment for lameness, which could signal an end to joint disease. WOW.

It involves taking a blood sample and mixing it with speacially treated glass beads therefore producing an anti imflamatory substance.
Says the treatment isnt painful and a treatment cost you £600 for 6 syringes. 1 course usually involves 2/3 injections so the other syringes can be frozen and used a later date.

Just wondering if this is going to be a wonder cure for lameness, and how many people would actually try it on their horses.
I know for one that i would give it a try to see if it would help Ebi.

So would you give it a go?

 

[Bossanova]

It seems to have uses in some cases of osteoarthritis and it's quite an interesting technique- certainly something to keep an eye on but I feel it will be rather like stem-cell treatent- an expensive last resort!!

 

[debbielinder]

as a last resort i would just would be worried about anything going wrong but if nothin else worked and had nothing else to loose and my vet recommended it i would deffo give it a go

 

[_daisy_]

that was my first thought - very interesting. Id like to read more into it just to see how it works exactly.

 

[_daisy_]

yes that thought is always in the back of your mind - just what if it goes wrong. Like you say though if youve got nothing to loose you can only gain.

 

[Lucy_Ally]

When you talk of IRAP do you mean interleukin-1 receptor antagonist protein? If so there seems to be some literature that has shown some positive results when injected into the joint but not into the bloodstream.


From:


Novel biological approaches to the intra-articular treatment of osteoarthritis.
Evans CH.
BioDrugs. 2005;19(6):355-62.

Intra-articular injections of hyaluronic acid are widely used, but are highly controversial because their mode of action is unclear and clinical trials have provided contradictory results. The conclusions of meta-analyses are also discordant. An alternative therapy, based on the intra-articular injection of autologous conditioned serum, is used in Europe. This product, known as Orthokine, is generated by incubating venous blood with etched glass beads. In this way, peripheral blood leukocytes produce elevated amounts of the interleukin-1 receptor antagonist and other anti-inflammatory mediators that are recovered in the serum. Considerable symptomatic relief has been reported in clinical trials of this product


The use of anakinra in juvenile arthritis.
Reiff A.
Curr Rheumatol Rep. 2005 Dec;7(6):434-40.

Interleukin-1 (IL-1), one of the major pro-inflammatory cytokines, plays an important role in the pathophysiology and progression of adult and pediatric arthritis. Inhibiting IL-1 activity by using a recombinant human IL-1 receptor antagonist (anakinra) moderately reduced the signs and symptoms of active arthritis in adults and slowed the rate of radiographic destruction.

It looks quite interesting but before using it on my own horse I would have to know a bit more about it.