The equine inflammatory response to abdominal surgery in the absence of gastrointestinal disease
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Date
2019-05
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The Ohio State University
Abstract
The invasive nature of colic surgery likely contributes to the postoperative inflammatory response. It is currently unknown how much of the inflammatory reaction is due to underlying gastrointestinal disease compared to surgery and anesthesia alone. Our objective was to investigate the severity of the inflammatory response to ventral midline celiotomy in clinically normal horses. We hypothesized that the horses in this study would have significant increases in acute phase proteins in response to surgery, and the increase in serum amyloid A (SAA) would be less than that seen in horses with surgical gastrointestinal disease. We also hypothesized that horses with a higher body condition score (BCS) would have a larger inflammatory response than their lean counterparts. 10 adult light breed horses (n=5 BCS <5, n=5 BCS >/=7) had a routine ventral midline celiotomy performed under general anesthesia, including manual decompression of the small intestine. Blood samples were collected for fibrinogen, SAA, CBC, chemistry profile, and lactate measurements at the following time points: 0, 12, 24, 48, 72, 120 and 168 hours. Data were found to be normally distributed with a Shapiro-Wilk. Significance was assessed with 1-way repeated measures ANOVA between timepoints, and 2 sampled t-test between groups. Values of P<0.05 were considered significant. SAA increased significantly starting at 12 hours postoperatively (124 +/- 68 mg/L) and peaked at 48 hours (507 +/- 175 mg/L), while fibrinogen remained increased throughout the postoperative study period. No significant difference was found between lean and obese groups. This study was limited by small sample size and variability among individuals. Results demonstrate that the postoperative acute phase response is less than previously reported for clinical surgical colic cases and decreases rapidly in the absence of underlying gastrointestinal disease. This study can also be used as a baseline for comparison of SAA in clinical cases.
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Keywords
Serum Amyloid A, Acute phase protein, Colic, Horse, Abdominal Surgery