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Re: [RC] Magnesium supplementing...etc. - k s swigartTruman Prevatt" <tprevatt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> said: Your first response would be determined by the likelihood that a deficiency exist. How common is magnesium deficiencies in horses? Face it our horses in general have a better diet than we do. If magnesium deficiencies are common - yep it's something you want to look at. If they are not - say one in 1,000 or even one in 100 you probably would look elsewhere as the prime problem and while you are at it pull blood to check for a defiency. And Diane said: BTW, remember that awful Tom Ivers and his warning about the chelating potential of beet pulp? Well, IF your horse's blood work comes back deficient in magnesium and you are feeding beet pulp, you might need to add a teensy weensy bit more to cover that. However, to quote my first post (you guys weren't paying attention): "Yes, magnesium MIGHT help make your horse less spooky (if your horse is magnesium deficient, and, BTW, a blood test is not a reliable indicator of this, although I have been doing some reading that suggests a urinalysis might be)." See that...."a blood test is not a reliable indicator." And Diane wasn't paying attention to Tom Ivers's report either, since the only study that mentioned the effect of dietary uptake of magnesium in horses being affected by beet pulp (the first one on the six mature horses) said that "No diet effect on magnesium absorption was observed." And Truman said: So the 64 dollar question here is "how common are magnesium deficiencies?" And the answer is, since virtually nobody tests for it (in fact they haven't actually determined if there is a reliable test for it), "nobody knows." However, if one of the symptoms is that it makes horses spooky, then the answer might be "quite a lot." Especially since the abstract from the study performed on working horses in The Netherlands said that the effects on neuromuscular activity are subclinical (presumably it needed some kind of electronic monitoring device to find the measurable differences). The question is not "how common on magnesium deficiencies?" but rather "will we know a magnesium deficiciency if we see one?" And the answer to that is, "not if we are unwilling to consider it as a possibility and dismiss it as nothing more than a schooling problem." Diane also said: If your horse is magnesium deficient, the symptoms will be 24/7 and should be most apparent when your horse is NOT in a training/ schooling situation. And this is simply not true. Irritability is most apparent when the nervous system is stimulated. So a horse is just snoozing or is comfortable in its environment, the irritability may be less likely to manifest itself, and it may not be until the horse gets into an unfamiliar or uncomfortable environment that this irritability manifests itself as a spook. All that said, when it comes right down to it, not very much is known about the prevalence or effects of magnesium deficiency in horses. And the bad news is, that hypermagnesmia (i.e. too much magnesium) has some unpleasant symptoms (including decreased respiratory rates and cardiac arrest), so one ought to be careful about just adding it to your horse's diet; although, it appears that a certain amount of renal failure is a pre-requesite for this condition, since as long as the kidneys are functioning properly, excess magnesium can be passed out in the urine (this might be why urinalysis is considered a more reliable test of magnesium status than a blood test). But I would certainly want to be careful of oversupplementing w magnesium during an endurance ride, where the horse may be sufficiently dehydrated that the kidneys can't get rid of excess magnesium. It isn't a simple matter of "do a blood test, throw a little magnesium at him and presto the problem goes away." kat Orange County, Calif. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Ridecamp is a service of Endurance Net, http://www.endurance.net. Information, Policy, Disclaimer: http://www.endurance.net/Ridecamp Subscribe/Unsubscribe http://www.endurance.net/ridecamp/logon.asp Ride Long and Ride Safe!! =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
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