Independent Horse Vets Near Tring, Aylesbury

Preventative Care

Gastroscopy

Contrary to popular belief having a gastroscopy done is not as bad as you think. We are able to scope horses on your yard and only require them to be starved overnight. The whole procedure only lasts 15-20 minutes and you can see everything we do at the same time. You can ask questions and we can send you all of the images and video from the scope itself for future reference.

Alpha 2 EQ

New injectable orthobiologics used for performance horses

Prescriptions

Written prescriptions are available on request

Gastroscopy

We offer imaging of your horse’s stomach – a fully mobile service

Inside the Stomach

Gastroscopy

Have you ever suspected you horse may suffer from gastric ulcers? Some signs such as picky eating, poor body condition, change in behaviour or poor performance may rise the red flag. However, there is scarce strong evidence relating these signs with gastric ulcers and, to make it more difficult, some of these signs overlap with other conditions.

Fortunately, gastric ulcers are fairly straight forward to rule in or out. All we need to do is check the stomach itself! You may have heard about this test, the gastroscopy. It is a simple procedure that we perform on the standing horse, in your own yard. We introduce a scope or camera into your horse´s stomach and visualise not only the location of the ulcers but also their depth; this way we grade their severity. This is utterly important when it comes to designing the specific treatment for your horse as well as following up and ensuring resolution of the ulcers. Blind trial treatments cannot ensure accurate individual treatment, leading to disappointing flareups or non-responsive cases.

Whether you keep your horse in a well-lit stable or in the middle of a field, our battery-operated, fully mobile gastroscope is ready to help you find out whether your horse is suffering from gastric ulcers. The procedure itself takes an average of 20-30mins, depending on the case, and the majority of horses tolerate it very well under mild sedation. This allows us to identify all the portions of the stomach with no blind spots!

If you are concerned about your horse, get in touch and seek veterinary advice. We can help you to find out!

REFERENCES

Sykes, B. W., Hewetson, M., Hepburn, R. J., Luthersson, N. and Tamzali, Y. (2015) ‘European College of Equine Internal Medicine Consensus Statement—equine gastric ulcer syndrome in adult horses’, Journal of Veterinary Internal Medicine, 29(5), 1288.

Vokes, J., Lovett, A. and Sykes, B. (2023) ‘Equine gastric ulcer syndrome: an update on current knowledge’. Animals, 13(7), 1261.

Have a look at what's normal

The Equine Stomach

The horse's stomach can essentially be divided into two portions:

Non glandular – the top of the stomach, which has no acid

Glandular – the bottom of the stomach which holds the stomach acid.

There are several areas where issues more commonly occur: the greater curvature, the lesser curvature and around the pylorus.

The Normal Stomach

Greater, Lesser Curvature and Pylorus

Here you can see a video showing the lesser curvature and pylorus. The lesser curvature is like a “shelf”, whilst the pylorus is the exit from the stomach into the small intestine – seen as a round circle towards the end of the video.

You can also see the acid sat in the bottom of the stomach