“We have all these new treatment options for lameness in the horse, but with no controlled studies to indicate whether their utilization is warranted or even effective,” laments Rich Redding, DVM, MS, Dipl. ACVS, associate professor of equine surgery at North Carolina State University. And he’s certainly not alone in wishing for more research on equine veterinary medical therapies.

Luckily for Redding and the rest of us, the new Equine Orthopedic Research Laboratory under the direction of Michael Schramme, DrVetMed, CertEO, PhD, DECVS, has several equine orthopedic research projects underway. Dianne Little, BVSc, PhD, MRCVS, Dipl. ACVS, Postdoctoral Fellow in Equine Orthopedics and Director of the Equine Outpatient Imaging Service, recently discussed their current research projects with The Horse.

Suspensory ligament investigation “We have funding from the Grayson-Jockey Club Research Foundation to look at normal hind limb suspensory ligaments and compare magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) findings with ultrasound findings and ultimately histology (microscopic tissue examination),” she says. This work will help researchers learn more about normal suspensory ligament architecture and patterns of sub-clinical injury so they can better understand injuries that ultimately cause lameness.

New model of tendonitis “Other models of tendonitis use collagenase (to create lesions), which is an enzyme that breaks down tendon fibers,” Little says. “The trouble with that is that you get a very unpredictable lesion size and shape, whereas we burr out the center of the tendon—physically creating a lesion. These lesions are much more similar to what you’d see with a clinical case. After surgery, we MRI the legs, and then we’ll look at the gross lesions all the way down to histology and electron microscopy, and compare that to the ultrasound and MRI as they heal