Saturday, November 5, 2011

Horse Joint Supplements And Healthy Horses

By Ryan Ready


Horse Joint Supplements are great for the mount. Horses have joint problems because we often ask them to do things they were not designed to do. After domesticating the mount, man designed contests for him that put a lot of extra stress on his joint parts. Think, for example, of the concussive force on joint parts of the front limbs when a 1,200 pound horse sails over a 6-foot jump and lands on his front feet. Dressage seems like a reasonably harmless contest as far as putting stress on joints is concerned, but that's not true. The advanced dressage mount must move his center of gravity much more to the back, placing more stress over the back limbs.

A number of the horizontal movements, such as the shoulder-in as well as half-pass, cause high joint stress particularly on the hock. The kinds of illness and injury that can afflict dressage mounts include degenerative joint disease of the hocks, swelling and degenerative joint disease of the front pasterns, swelling within the middle knee joint, and degenerative joint disease and swelling of the fetlock. A barrel racing horse speeding through the cloverleaf course places severe stress within the joint parts with his front and rear limbs. There is normally a compounding of difficulties with barrel racers because in some instances the horses were retired from the racetrack and bring with them problematic front knees, front fetlocks, as well as front suspensory equipment.

Western pleasure horses which go sedately and slowly across the ring might also be susceptible to joint disease because of their conformation. To intensify a decided on manner of moving, a lot of Western pleasure horses have been bred and selected to have straighter shoulder blades and a lot more upright pasterns as compared to mounts which function at speed. This type of conformation could set the stage for poor shock absorption and as a result joint sickness. A prime adversary of joint health is chaffing. To guard versus chaffing we need lubrication. And exactly where does this lubrication inside a joint come from? The joint capsule is made up of an inner lining known as the synovial membrane.

This lining secretes the particular synovial fluid that lubricates the joint. A key ingredient in this fluid is hyaluronic acid, also called sodium hyaluronate or hyaluronan, which lubricates the synovial membrane. Another substance inside synovial fluid, a protein called lubricin, is the main lubricant of the cartilage material. In some cases of joint illness there's a depletion of this vital fluid. The particular joint capsule is made up of the fibrous capsule and an internal coating layer called the synovial membrane layer. The synovial membrane creates the synovial fluid, which offers lubrication inside the joint itself.

Horse Joint Supplements could actually help the mount. There are various disease processes that have an effect on the nature of this particular synovial fluid because of inflammation and disease in the synovial membrane. The most frequent sign which the horse master or trainer sees is any type of swelling within the joint is abnormal fluid creation. This is because of inflammation of the synovial membrane. The liquid made by inflamed synovial membrane usually has a lower viscosity or more watery. This is a sign of hindrance in production of hyaluronic acid, which is the key ingredient providing lubrication in the joint fluid.




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