AAEP Convention 2004: 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 different 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, in his presentation on lameness

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

Keegan noted that most equine practitioners use head movement to determine forelimb lameness, and pelvis movement to clarify hindlimb lameness. “However, the specific components of the head or pelvic motion that are important for the evaluation of equine lameness have not been clearly described or agreed on by veterinarians,” he commented. Furthermore, multiple lamenesses can certainly complicate the issue.

Conventional veterinary wisdom makes two statements regarding head nod and forelimb lameness, he said: With forelimb lameness, the head nods up when the lame limb is on the ground, and the head goes down when the sound limb lands (the “down when sound” maxim). “The first statement is true sometimes, and the second one false sometimes,” he stated.

To illustrate the variability of horses’ carriage changing with different lamenesses, Keegan first 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 notably with the next video, that 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. Graphs showing the movement of markers on their heads very clearly showed the differences in the movement patterns between all three horses

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Written by:

Christy West has a BS in Equine Science from the University of Kentucky, and an MS in Agricultural Journalism from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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