A recent survey published in England revealed that 70% of all sport horses sustain at least one musculo-skeletal disorder in any training season. In the past few years, horse health professionals have expressed the need for better and more definitive ways to treat back soreness in horses and to be able to differentiate between lameness caused by injury to the limbs and lameness caused by altered stance and movement due to pain in the pelvis, spine, or neck, and the attending muscles and ligaments .

As testimony to the high demand for new information in this area, more than 100 veterinarians and therapists attended a two-day in-depth seminar in October 1999 on the equine back as part of the Second Annual Sports Medicine Conference, hosted by Rochester Equine Clinic in Rochester, N.H.

Featured speaker was Professor Jean-Marie Denoix, DVM, PhD, of the National Veterinary College at Alfort in France. Denoix presented a series of more than 100 anatomy slides showing the skeletal and muscular structure of different regions of the horse’s back. These individual areas later were linked with specific problems related to the job a horse has to do (such as jumping), the effects of rider imbalance and ill-fitting tack, and the contribution of poor conformation, unsatisfactory shoeing, and lack of conditioning for the task.

Denoix has developed ultrasound and radiographic techniques for isolating structures in the back in hopes of finding lesions or skeletal abnormality and to pinpoint the the precise source of pain in the horse’s back (which might not be the same area where soreness or limited movement is most evident). He said the non-specific nature of most back pain in horses is stress-related and chronic rather than caused by an acute injury that begs to be diagnosed. Key to the complexity of the equine back was Denoix’ concise observation that the horse’s back contains the largest muscles and the smallest joints in the horse.

An important factor in the diagnosis of back pain is knowledge of previous injury to the horse. Many horses have sparse medical records from their early years, making it difficult for owners to know whether pain is a new condition or a recurrent theme