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Re: [RC] [AERC-Members] Ulcers - heidiThis study shows that gastric ulcers might be more the rulethanthe exception when we exercise horses. Ongoing studies should provide more ways--dietary and pharmaceutical--in which we can normalize the pH or cushion the equine GI system to minimize damage.I would read this to mean DIETARY first then pharmaceutical as a last resort. Certainly, we can't take it to mean that more horses should be on drugs, than not. The article describes how the stomach works when the horse is exercised. It sounds like it does what it is suppose to do. As the author indicated, the same thing happens in human athletes. However, not all athletes, and I'm going to stretch it a bit here, I would say most athletes don't get acid reflux and heartburn. Why?Because if they are serious about their training and competition schedule, they watch what they eat and how hard they train, including R&R. I would further add some points of consideration to this. 1) This relates back to dietary management, but keep in mind that food in the stomach pretty well dilutes the acid so that it isn't damaging. Hence, in a sport like endurance where the horse is encouraged to eat at every opportunity, those horses that will do so are providing themselves with their own preventative. 2) Keep in mind that simply confining a horse to a stall increases the risk of ulcers considerably. As Kat pointed out, one needs to do controlled studies to really look at this, but it would be interesting to see if the rate of ulcers in stalled horses was really much less than that in endurance horses. 3) Although Barney's study (as he himself pointed out) is a long way from "proving" a lot of things that we'd like to, it is still noteworthy that racehorses (who only exercise for a few minutes) have nearly double the rate of ulcers of endurance horses, who exercise steadily for hours. 4) Keep in mind that the only thing that the study quoted here demonstrated was the physical approximation of acid-containing contents of the stomach with the walls of the upper part of the stomach--it did not demonstrate that this situation caused an increase in occurrence of ulcers. There are a great many other factors at work here. Heidi ============================================================ REAL endurance is sleeping in the tack compartment of your trailer w/the door open, and your horse snorts/snots on your forehead every 30 min! ~ Heidi Sowards ridecamp.net information: http://www.endurance.net/ridecamp/ ============================================================
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