14/01/2024
About eight years ago there was a shift in the discussion of laminitis and veterinarians were talking about ‘whole body inflammation’ because it starts to create links between many health problems. Laminitis is not a stand alone illness, there is always systemic inflammation alongside it. Issues such as laminitis, EMS, leaky gut, insulin resistance and musculoskeletal problems all have the potential to be associated with each other.
When there is an issue in the body, a localised inflammation response will occur, this release of chemical messengers initiates a physiological response which in turn leads to the recovery of the issue.
However if there is excessive inflammation (when the trigger/cause of the initial inflammation is not resolved which is often the case when laminitis is triggered) then the body keeps sending out these chemical messengers and they travel systemically and start to impact the other tissues. We then see inflammation occurring in places we wouldn’t necessarily link to ‘laminitis’.
The picture shows one of these symptoms that many of you will be familiar with. ‘Supra-orbital swelling’ (above-eye swelling) but what we are also seeing here is swelling directly behind the eye too.
Although the pictures are at very slightly different angles, you can see that it’s not just above the eye that is swollen, the whole eyeball has been pushed outwards.
The pony in these pictures are the lovely Megan who came to us in December. These photographs were taken four weeks apart and show the marked improvement in swelling. Not only has the swelling above her eye gone down, her whole eyeball is protruding less. The soft tissues around the eye make it easy to see inflammation in this area but it’s a nice guide to see how her body is responding overall to her new lifestyle.
