Lameness Diagnosis via Head and Pelvis Movement

"I used to think I knew how to evaluate a horse's movement for lameness, until I started to look more carefully. Two highly experienced practitioners can evaluate a lame horse and come up with different (lame) legs," said Kevin Keegan, DVM, MS, Dipl. ACVS, associate professor of veterinary medicine and surgery at the University of Missouri. He discussed conclusions he and colleagues noted about interpreting lameness via head and pelvic movement using observations of more than 100 horses evaluated on a treadmill with computer-assisted gait analysis and video.

Keegan said most equine practitioners use head movement to determine forelimb lameness and pelvis movement to clarify hind limb lameness. He added that multiple lamenesses can certainly complicate the issue.

Keegan showed a video of a normal horse trotting on a treadmill with a graphic evaluation of his head position (seen head-on). His perfectly consistent wave pattern of head up and down movement contrasted with a video of a lame horse (one forelimb) that showed less downward movement of the head only and no change in upward movement. Another lame horse (one forelimb) only had more upward head movement when pushing off of the lame limb