Horse Mobility and the joints

If you’ve ever suffered from arthritis or torn cartilage you will understand how agonising joint pain can be. Damage to joints over time, or as the result of an injury is just as possible for a horse as it is for a human.

Logic tells us that making the materials that make up the cartilage and vital joint fluid readily available, ensures that all of those materials in the joint can be replaced and repaired as necessarily. Of course if there is already enough in the diet or if your horse is making enough for itself then adding more won’t help. This is probably the case for many horses on medium to low workloads whose wear and tear on the joints is minimal. But for older horses and those working harder, joint supplementation can be a wise move.

The most common joint nutrients are:

• Glucosamine
• Chondroitin
• MSM
• Hyaluronic acid

So here’s the ‘sciency’ bit…or lack of: The science supporting these ingredients in horses is pretty patchy. That doesn’t mean these ingredients don’t help. It just means that science hasn’t really looked at them very thoroughly.

Glucosamine is used by the body to produce a variety of other chemicals that are involved in building tendons, ligaments, cartilage, and the thick fluid that surrounds joints. Some science says that only 2% of supplemented glucosamine is absorbed. But nobody has actually tested lower dose rates.

MSM is an organic form of sulphur which can be hugely beneficial when supplemented to horses which have mobility issues or are just getting older. MSM is also able to function as an antioxidant, a key nutrient group when looking to supplement the mobility system as a whole, rather than just the immediate joint.

Chondroitin is a vital part of cartilage, giving it elasticity by helping it retain water. There is one firm that claims that supplemented chondroitin is too large a molecule to be absorbed properly through the gut wall, however the same company adds the much larger Hyaluronic Acid molecule to their joint supplements. Again there isn’t any science to help us decide.

At EquiFeast we have never use Hyaluronic acid. We resisted the temptation when it became fashionable and now are perfectly happy with the feedback we receive from our customers without it. However, we do currently use the other three in all of our mobility supplements.

In the next article – the role of the tendons, ligaments and muscles in healthy mobility - CLICK HERE

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