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RE: [RC] Hydration/Angie - heidi

Elytes are not a magic bullet. You can pump in all the elytes you want and 
still have a horse die from too much fluid. 

 

Have you seen an overhydrated horse that had not had IV fluids? 

Angie 


Can't say that I have.  But I still also remember being told by a
professor at vet school that you could stick 6 IV catheters into a
healthy horse with healthy kidneys and run isotonic fluids into them
full-bore, and the horse's kidneys would deal sufficiently with the
overload.  Where you could get into trouble with this is if the horse
has been so dehydrated that his kidneys have shut down, and when it
takes time for them to begin working again sufficiently to handle the
overload.

What I HAVE seen, and more than once, is horses e-lyted and e-lyted, so
that the cell membranes can no longer cope, so the water flow
reverses--instead of being absorbed out of the gut and going into the
blood stream to go into the cells and the extacellular spaces, the
fluid instead flows INTO the gut, and the surrounding tissues become
increasingly dehydrated.  If the gut shuts down at the same time (which
it often does) you get fluid refluxing back up into the stomach, and yes
indeed, if you try to force more fluid into such horses via NG tube, you
run the risk of rupturing the stomach.  

Just my own gut feeling, having dealt with reflux and anterior enteritis
in endurance horses but not in horses dehydrated from lack of drinking,
but I suspect we set these horses up for this by giving so many
e-lytes, and I'd be far less willing to administer fluids via NG tube
to an endurance horse for that very reason than I would to a horse
with, say, an impaction colic out in the paddock.  Messing with
intracellular and extracellular compartmentalization of various e-lytes
really sets the horse up for problems.

Heidi


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