Can a horse recover from tendon injury?
Horse tendon injury recovery is possible. However, the mildest horse tendon injury recovery can take between 9-12 months. A more severe injury can take a much longer time. Moreover, as a horse gets older recovery process tends to extend. Therefore, it is crucial to find the most effective way of how to treat horse tendon injury. Overall, they can be divided into traditional and advanced treatments.
Traditional treatments
- Anti-inflammatory drugs – essential drugs for tendon injury treatment. Oral or intravenous (IV) phenylbutazone (Bute) supplies a potent analgesic effect. Oral, IV, or intramuscular steroids provide a strong anti-inflammatory effect. And intramuscular polysulfated glycosaminoglycan offers soft tissue anti-inflammatory effects.
- Physical Therapy – physical therapy should start with 15-minute sessions of knee and fetlock joint flexions within the horse’s range of motion. Your veterinarian should then prescribe a controlled exercise regimen based on the injury’s ultrasonographic appearance.
- Surgical correction – certain injuries require surgical correction, which can include tendon splitting. Lately, veterinarians have advocated this method only in acute cases involving a hematoma or seroma (fluid accumulation in the tissues that can become bone infection).
Advances treatments
- PRP – Platelet – Rich Plasma – it’s a blood product that contains at least twice the platelet count of normal blood. It provides high levels of growth factors for healing.
- Scaffold-Based Therapy – it creates a mini-ecosystem in a wound along with growth factors and all the signals involved in the healing process.
- Stem Cell Therapy – a veterinarian injects Stem Cells into the diseased area. Then they move to the inflamed or damaged tissue and suppress the inflammation. As a result, they relieve pain and cause new tissue to grow. Thereby, therapy prevents damages and injury recurrence, improves a horse’s health and overall well-being. Medrego EquiCell product is one of the most effective treatments. It has up to 90% success rate, the first results may be seen after 2 weeks and it’s 100% safe.
If left untreated, damage to a tendon can continue to increase in severity due to the inflammatory process.