A few years ago, French researchers developed a dynamometric horse shoe—essentially, a pressure-sensitive shoe they hoped would provide useful information about how footing affects our horses’ health. And there’s good news from those researchers: The shoe has done just that.
At the 2016 International Society for Equitation Science conference, held June 23-26 in Saumur, France, the Sequisol research team was back to share what their dynamometric shoe, complete with high-speed kinematic filming, is revealing.
“We have demonstrated that training on a hard track does increase injury risk, as seen by correlations between injuries and the various forces and angles of the lower leg during movement across the surface,” said presenter Nathalie Crevier-Denoix, DVM, PhD, Dipl. ACVSMR, of the Equine Biomechanics and Musculoskeletal Pathology department of the Ecole Nationale Vétérinaire d’Alfort and the French National Institute of Agronomic Research.
While this might seem intuitive to many riders, the injury risk related to hard surfaces has not previously been shown in a prospective study, Crevier-Denoix said. And no research team has ever been able to show the biomechanical “how” and “why” of these injuries until now.
To collect their data, the team places the dynamometric shoe on selected fore or hind hooves of a ridden or driven horse. The shoe provides critical information about maximal forces and loading rates (in all three axes—longitudinal, transversal, and vertical) at each instant of “stance”—the time the foot is actually touching the ground.
Meanwhile, synchronized cameras provide high-speed (1,000 frames per second) video footage that allows the scientists to see exactly what’s going on, frame by frame, in 2-D or 3-D, in combination with the recorded forces from the shoe. They can measure every angle of every structure within the leg and foot—joints, tendons, ligaments, etc.—at any precise instant of the stance, during all gaits, in straight lines or while turning, and even while jumping, on all kinds of surfaces.
“During stance, the horse’s hooves come in contact with the surface, slide, and sink more or less into it, then compress it differently according to the limb, the gait, the speed, and the surface properties,” Crevier-Denoix said. “The different phases of stance are affected by the surface’s properties.”
Her team studied horses working on different kinds of footing, different top-layer thicknesses, and different surface maintenance methods. They found that all these footing factors play a role in horse health and that certain footing types, thicknesses, and maintenance methods are better than others.
Hard tracks, they found, are associated with a much higher injury rate than softer ones. In their most recent study, they followed 12 young Standardbred horses over four months during training. Half the horses trained on a hard sand track, while the other half trained on a soft sand track. In the hard track group, 50% of the horses had developed moderate to severe superficial digital flexor tendon (SDFT) tendinopathies in both front legs by the end of the study period. The hind fetlocks were also more frequently—and more severely—affected in this group than in the soft track group, Crevier-Denoix said.
Source : TheHorse