Horse Mobility Three – The role of calcium signalling in tendons, ligaments and muscles

The first two articles in this series have discussed nutrients that most people interested in horse performance and welfare will have heard of. They have been around a long time and lots of firms offer various single ingredient or complex blends of them.

At EquiFeast we would love to know exactly how our products work as well as how well they work. If you have read the previous articles you will already know that we believe the existing science is pretty limited at helping us with either of these questions. But customer feedback and good honest observational skills are powerful ways of gaining evidence for efficacy and field trials helps provide quantifiable evidence.

We do two things to try to better understand what our products do:

1. We carefully monitor (on a database of well over 10,000 horses) the feedback of our customers and their horses for a number of months after starting on any of our products that contain this particular nutrient (more about that later). By having competent and well trained customer advisors (mostly with degrees in equine science or equine business) we feed the information we glean into our R&D and product development programmes. In 2014 we won the FSB/WorldPay Award for Business Innovation for the way we leverage customer feedback into product development. That was an award for firms up to £250 million turnover (much larger than us and easily including every UK horse feed manufacturer a number of times over).

2. This information then feeds into field trials that we run in the real world under real conditions. Interestingly there is a growing group of nutritionists who believe this is a better way of understanding nutrition than the Randomised Controlled Trial. More and more we find ourselves doing this work in Australia as it is a far more research friendly environment than Europe.

So what does this have to do with mobility in horses? Well in 2012 we started some work on horses in Australia that had severe problems with bones and muscles and that had persistent lameness issues that vets never seemed to be able to pin down. The full story of Big Head or oxalate poisoning is a big one and if you want to know more click here.

But the clear outcome of these trials was that taking calcium out of the diet (the opposite of the conventional treatment) and supplementing with a nutrient that helps with calcium regulation and the function of most of the cells in the body, had profound effects on all the trial horses. Their bone deformities disappeared, their muscles started to work properly and they stopped trying to pull calcium from their bones with the hormones PTH and Calcitriol (active Vitamin D).

In this Australian case we know exactly why these horses were suffering – they were poisoned by oxalates in their pasture. Unfortunately for many horse owners there they simply have no access to oxalate free grasses. So they have to find an alternative solution or give up horses completely. That solution turns out to be the nutrient we are discussing here.

But the questions we wanted to answer were:

• Do we see similar symptoms in horses that are not affected by oxalates?
• Would the same nutrient addition to the diet help these horses?

Two trials support this hoped for outcome.

1. We selected horses with Kissing Spine as a model because they have problems with bones, muscles, tendons and ligaments just as the Australian horses. But we picked horses with no exposure to oxalates. What we found was that if we gave these horses this nutrient they showed statistically significant improvements in Muscle Relaxation and Suppleness and all of them avoided the surgical option.

When we gave this nutrient along with the more conventional mobility support nutrients (see articles 1 and 2 in this series) we got the same improvements only better. So our conclusion is that this nutrient helps mobility at a fundamental level and provides a foundation on which the other ingredients can build.

2. We then discovered horses grazing high calcium soils that had the same group of symptoms as oxalate affected horses - poor muscle function, bone deformities and difficult behaviour. Blood tests show that all these horses have quite severe muscle damage and, despite high calcium diets, these horses are pumping hormones to remove calcium from their bones and put it into their blood. This should not be happening!

For a variety of reason we don’t have time to go into here we believe that high calcium diets can lead to exclusion of organically complexed calcium from the blood. We are convinced that this calcium (also known as chelated calcium) has a role in calcium signalling (CS). And CS is involved in calcium regulation, muscle function, hormone release and bone repair and renewal, and the laying down of the structural material (collagen) in tendons and ligaments.

This trial is at the very early stages but we do know that horses on the same yards have already shown substantial improvements in health and mobility when fed a chelated calcium supplement. So now you know the secret ingredient – it is chelated calcium.

So what is chelated calcium?

There are a number of different chelated calcium molecules that seem to have the same or similar effects. But for simplicity imagine the calcium is wrapped up in one or more sugar molecules or amino acids. Vets have injected these things into animals for years.

It used to be assumed that molecules like this, once absorbed into the body, simply gave up their calcium. But that appears not to be the case. These molecules have long been known to be natural components of blood and body fluids – unfortunately no academic scientist has thought to see if they do anything or not. We now believe that they have an important role in the process that switches cells on an off (calcium signalling). If you would like to know more about this (as we do) please send a few million dollars and we will finance some fundamental research.

We are very pleased that a team at the James Cook University Vet School are showing an interest in working on these molecules and we hope some trials will be forthcoming over the next few years. And if we are really lucky they will help develop a test so we can measure these molecules in blood. The reality is there is a huge amount to do to really understand what is happening at a molecular level. In the meantime there are a number of EquiFeast mobility and other supplements and feeds available that incorporate this unique approach.
*The use of chelated calcium in horses is protected by patents and in other species by pending patents.