Don’t Cal It CUSHING’S DISEASE!
A Warmbloods Today journalist makes an interesting discovery about her aging horse, struggling in his dressage work. For Patti and her Dutch Warmblood Novio, trouble began with his two hind leg suspensory injuries, which were later somehow linked to Cushing’s. Patti’s research on the subject helped her understand both the facts and the misconcep- tions about this equine condition and its treatment.
By Patti Schofler
made, including a more relevant definition, an auxiliary method for diagnosis and a better medication to control symptoms. But despite all this progress, this condition remains one that can be very deceiving. All that I’ve learned
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about my horse’s problems has turned my stormy out- look about his future into sunshiny days. You know how your whole attitude changes when your ill or in- jured horse is making prog- ress? To quote the song, af- ter searching for answers to Novio’s problems for almost two years, “I’m walking on sunshine, and don’t it feel good!”
hat’s up with Cushing’s disease? If it’s not something you’ve had to face recently (or ever), you may not realize a great deal of scientific progress has been
It’s not just for old horses. The human disease and the horse disease are not the same. Most horses with its symptoms do not have a pituitary gland tumor.
The shaggy, curly hair coat is the end stage, with many stages long before.
Testing results aren’t always what they’re cracked up to be. The old pergolide treatment is out; a new one is in (see sidebar). These horses are not “done,” they can have full lives and can often continue competing.
Treatment is not necessarily required forever; some horses can become symptom free over time.
Insulin resistance and PPID are not one and the same; sometimes a horse has both, sometimes one or the other.
Just as most PPID horses probably don’t have a tumor,
The author Patti and her horse Novio showing years ago.
The Truth Behind Cushing’s Disease To start off, let’s not call this condition Cushing’s disease. Lan- guage matters; if it wasn’t uncool in the world of science, we could call Cushing’s “something-is-wrong-with-the-pituitary- gland syndrome.” While Cushing’s disease is easier to say, the proper medical term is pituitary pars intermedia dysfunction, or PPID. When neurosurgeon Dr. Harvey Cushing first described the human condition that took on his name, he gave horse people a facile definition to catch hold of. The cause of the “disease” we like to label as an older horse’s problem is a tumor on the pituitary gland. In truth, however, it is rarely a tumor that is the cause of its symptoms that can lead to fatal laminitis. The following are some of the most common misconcep- tions about this condition:
many have the disease long before they become the sunken backed, potbellied, sluggish, wooly mammoths with turned up toes from founder. Before this late stage of PPID, other symptoms difficult to detect may be telling you that PPID is stirring up trouble. Most associate the disease with horses 20 years old and
more, when in fact a middle-aged horse who seems to be aging fast may be displaying just one set of symptoms that tips off a diagnosis. PPID has shown up in horses as young as eight. Looking back, my horse Novio was 16 when things began to take a turn for the worse. Was he really old? Maybe by some standards; but to me he wasn’t old, old. And I too looked at Cushing’s as something that would befall an old horse—until veterinarian Dr. David Eckstein of Templeton, California set me straight.
Link Between PPID/Cushings and Injury He suggested that my horse’s two suspensory ligament tears in two years, each in a different hind leg, were not nor- mal—and possibly not my fault. Yes, both injuries happened as he was working at Fourth Level collection in dressage. However, that work was not unduly hard—since we had already earned two Fourth Level scores toward our USDF silver medal. And yet twice in my horse’s career, when my
Warmbloods Today 25
Courtesy Patti Schofler
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