01/27/2024
I hope 2024 is going well for everyone, wanted to share a new service I've added in the past week.
Insulin dysregulation (ID) is a common endocrine disorder in horses, with its most serious side effect being laminitis. As pasture grass starts to come in here in a month or so, laminitis occurrence will noticeably increase. In order to manage the risk of laminitis, blood testing is available to diagnose and track a horse's insulin sensitivity, enabling us to make medication/dietary changes as needed.
In the past, these blood samples needed to be sent to the lab. In the past couple months, however, a point-of-care insulin test has become commercially available, which I now offer. This will enable us to make more immediate management changes, and lower the cost of the testing. For those of you interested, here is a study demonstrating the new test's results compared to reference laboratory findings.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9999392/
If your horse has a previous history of laminitis, is a bit overweight, or previously been diagnosed with Insulin Dysregulation and/or Cushings disease (PPID), monitoring their insulin sensitivity status periodically can be very useful (and is now much easier to accomplish).
If you have any questions about how to utilize this testing, please give me a call.
The Wellness Ready Test (WRT) is a lateral flow, stall-side assay that measures equine insulin in whole blood and requires validation before recommending clinical use. We evaluated intra- and inter-assay precision and linearity and compared the WRT with ...
