Colic Surgery with Positive Outcomes

prominent breed representing 38 6 percent of the study population. Of the horses that survived to hospital discharge 83 7 percent returned to their previous or intended activity and 78 5 percent regained their presurgical or higher level of performance.
The vast majority of owners 96 3 percent were satisfied with the veterinary care and almost all of them 98 3 percent evaluated the recovery after the colic surgery to be satisfactory or above.
Colic surgeries can get rather complicated especially if there is need for bowel resection due to compromised blood flow or necrotic bowel says Immonen. This in turn can lower the prognosis for postoperative survival according to previous studies. It should also be noted that the horses taken into colic surgery are generally not in good clinical condition as it is an emergency surgery and they have a higher risk for complications and mortality during induction the anesthesia period and recovery from anesthesia.
Immonen says that because the horse is a large animal sometimes an accurate diagnosis its particular situation and what the prognosis may be can only be verified when the abdomen is seen and explored. Veterinarians are only able to ultrasound palpate rectally xray or examine parts of the intestine and abdomen before surgery and can only make a tentative clinical diagnosis according to the different findings and clinical status. Surgery can therefore reveal some surprising factors that the vet and the horse owner must be prepared for.
The most common single diagnosis was a type of displacement of the large intestine called the right dorsal displacement RDD says Immonen. In general large intestinal displacements were the largest group of colic. Depending on the patient the RDD was accompanied with a torsion of the colon andor colonic obstruction.
She adds that strangulation conditions which restrict blood flow to the intestine are the ones that usually need surgical intervention as the condition rarely resolves itself. 
In many cases displacements both nonstrangulating and strangulating are accompanied by an intestinal obstruction as one of the inflicting causes or a secondary problem to the strangulating lesiondisplacement so the division between the types of colic is not that simple. Simple obstructions are a common type of colic in horses and can most of the time be treated conservatively. But if the clinical status of the patient deteriorates there are only a few options left. The real strangulating colics are the ones that have only a