Study: Polyparasitism An Unlikely EPM Player in the Eastern U.S.

Sarah Schale, DVM, a clinical fellow in Large Animal Internal Medicine at Oregon State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine, in Corvallis, recently assessed whether horses with S. neurona-caused EPM had also been exposed to the protozoa Neospora hughesi and T. gondii. She presented her results at the Second EPM Society Workshop, held Oct. 25-27, 2017, in Tahoe City, California.
Her study included 101 neurologic cases seen at the University of Pennsylvania’s New Bolton Center, in Kennett Square; 49 horses had EPM (48 due to S. neurona, one caused by N. hughesi) and 52—the control group—had cervical vertebral stenotic myopathy (CVSM), a structural condition causing spinal cord compression.
“We found that a significantly increased proportion of the EPM cases were likely to be positive for S. neurona on serum, CSF (cerebrospinal fluid), and serum-CSF titer ratios compared to the CVSM cases,” she said, which isn’t unexpected. For N. hughesi, “about 14% of our cases total were positive for Neospora on serum, however, there was no statistically significant difference (in the N. hughesi serum titers, which are concentrations of antibodies) between EPM and CVSM cases
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