Background
For horse tendon injuries, vets typically use cold therapy (cryotherapy) to reduce swelling or heat therapy to increase flexibility. In human physical therapy, doctors often use “contrast therapy,” which switches between hot and cold. However, we don’t know if this contrast therapy is helpful for horses.
Objectives (What they wanted to find out)
This study had two main goals:
- To see if a specific contrast therapy machine could actually make a horse’s leg hot enough (above $40^\circ\text{C}$ / $104^\circ\text{F}$) and cold enough (below $15^\circ\text{C}$ / $59^\circ\text{F}$) to be therapeutic.
- To find out if those target temperatures could be reached at different depths inside the leg, near the main tendons.
Methods (How they did it)
Researchers used four healthy adult horses. They placed tiny, fine-wire temperature probes at different depths in the horses’ forelegs:
- On the skin
- Just under the skin
- Deep, next to the superficial digital flexor tendon (SDFT)
- Deeper, next to the deep digital flexor tendon (DDFT)
They then ran the hot-cold contrast machine for three full cycles, recording the temperatures at all locations to see how hot/cold the tissues got and how fast the temperature changed.
Read ‘Contrast therapy: Tissue heating and cooling properties within the equine distal limb’ on the BEVA website.