# Horse Health Study



## UOB research (7 July 2016)

Researchers at the University of Bristol are hoping for help from the horse owners of the UK.  To participate you simply need to live in the UK and own a horse, or have owned a horse within the past year.  The survey is very quick to complete and anyone that does so can be entered into a free prize draw for a brand new iPad Pro.   The aim of the research is to find out how healthy horses in the UK are and how common some diseases are amongst our horse population. 

The survey can be taken via the link https://svs.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/horse-health-questionnaire

All responses are greatly appreciated.


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## DD (7 July 2016)

Done one problem with it though. horse had sarcoid on chest which was small and flat , used Bloodroot cream (Newmarket Cream) and it has disappeared. However he has a sarcoid which looks like a wart on the inside of his hind leg,. used Bloodroot cream and its made it worse it went away only to return about 4 times as big and its still growing. have tied horse hair around it and am using  thuja cream at the moment, been diing for about a month no change seen yet.


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## UOB research (7 July 2016)

Thank you very much for your help.


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## JanetGeorge (7 July 2016)

Haven't looked yet - but does it cope with people who have LOTS of horses (about 66 right now - aged 1yo-24yo).  I've learned a few things about UN-common diseases I never wanted to know about over the years.


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## JanetGeorge (7 July 2016)

No - it doesn't.  Only one horse - and first alphabetically.  Well Alice shattered a back molar, probably biting on a rock.  So can't include the 4th branchial arch defect, or the small colon dystrophy, or even any of the ruddy sarcoids!  NOT very comprehensive.


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## spookypony (7 July 2016)

I'm not sure how the survey will give any but a very surface picture of the situation? I'd be interested to learn more about what you're hoping to learn, and the rationale behind the methodology. 

There are also some questions that might lead to troublesome ambiguities in interpretation, and I'm not sure if you can know how the reader interpreted the question. I'll give the three examples that bothered me most below, with a brief explanation of why I found the question problematic.

First, when asking about the horse being a good doer/fat, there were essentially three options:
Normal
Fat AND greedy
Thin AND fussy

As many people with Cushing's horses will know, one common symptom is loss of condition WHILE being a happy eater. So what do you do if the horse in question WAS "fat and greedy" but is now "THIN and greedy"? Only thing to do seemed to be to pick "fat and greedy", and qualify this later in the comments...

Second, the type of work the horse was in previously/is in now: there seems to be a tacit assumption that if the horse returns to previous work levels, it probably won't exceed them by much. I say this because there were many options for lesser/no levels of work, but only one for "equal or higher". This may indeed be the most common scenario, but the horse I was using for my example was just starting his career and pootling about the woods/doing a bit of Prelim when he first had a (thankfully mild) laminitis attack (he may well have had others before I got him; who knows?). I worked hard on his management, and he's made it up to 80km as an endurance horse since then, but before being diagnosed with Cushing's. I'd say that that is a pretty serious increase in performance, and while this might be far from the norm, it would be good to have an extra option in that question that allows you to see if a significant increase in performance happens, separately from a return to the same levels. I'm only pointing this out because this may be data useful to have in the future: the diagnosis and management of metabolically compromised horses is evolving very rapidly just now, and I suspect we may see a real increase in performance of such horses, which we can't measure unless we have a baseline of how they are performing now.

The third point is about farriery. I interpreted that as "professional hoof care", as I choose to use a (highly-trained) barehoof trimmer, and I suspect there will be others to do the same. In this context, I had to interpret "corrective farriery" to be "corrective trimming". Again, I explained this in the comments, but others might not, so if you are equating "farriery" with "shoeing", you might get a distortion in the results that you have no way of identifying.

I hope these remarks are helpful, and suggest some possible future refinements!


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