Study database
Work that fits none of the designs above, including methodological contributions and overviews.
HOHorse
Narrative review describing the process in two steps: first the missing alternation between loading and unloading disturbs perfusion of the lamellae, then the extra load tips the weakened tissue into acute laminitis; preserving load cycling counts for the authors as the central preventive measure.
HOHorse
Narrative review that ties the prognosis to the form of the break: complete tibial fractures in the adult horse offer few treatment routes and a comparatively high mortality, whereas stress fractures and minimally displaced incomplete fractures usually heal well without surgery.
HOHorse
No examined tree feature explained the hypoglycin A content of the seeds; what differed was the year, with neighbouring trees varying in step, the regional case count following the estimated seed production, and water in which seeds had lain still testing positive after 48 hours.
HOHorse
From the European surveillance data, 94 per cent of cases fall into two three-month windows from October and from March, and the authors state that any pasture with a sycamore nearby counts as at risk even if a case has never occurred there; the practical advice it contains is expert opinion, not measures that have been tested.
HUHuman
The same group of substances from the lychee aril blocks fatty acid breakdown in children, but presents there as hypoglycaemic encephalopathy rather than a breakdown of muscle, and is described only where undernutrition, long fasting and large amounts eaten come together.
MUMultiple species
The review rates the superficial digital flexor tendon of the horse as a functionally and clinically equivalent model of the human Achilles tendon, but stresses that it represents only the acute rupture and not chronic tendon pain.
MUMultiple species
The review describes persistent inflammation, excessive vascular ingrowth and immature repair tissue as the central reasons why healed tendon tissue does not reach the mechanical competence of the original.
HOHorse
The model calculation names the relative infectious power of carriers and the duration of carriage as the decisive gaps in knowledge, estimates the former at 0.05 to 0.5 and the duration of protection after an infection that has been overcome at four to six years, and suggests that the mere presence of carriers can keep the organism endemic.
HOHorse
Review: serum amyloid A outperforms the other equine acute phase proteins because of its kinetics; white blood cells and serum iron change within hours, serum amyloid A within a day, fibrinogen only after two to three days, yet most published studies cover very small animal numbers.
HOHorse
Review: serum amyloid A is the most important acute phase protein of the horse, very low in healthy animals and, thanks to its short half-life, well suited to following the course of a condition, including subclinical disturbances in sport horses.
MUMultiple species
Review: serum amyloid A consists of 104 amino acids, is strongly conserved across vertebrate evolution and can rise up to a thousandfold within 24 hours; it also acts in a cytokine-like way itself and is not merely a passive marker.
MUMultiple species
Review: the resolution of inflammation is a biosynthetically active process, steered by lipoxins from arachidonic acid together with resolvins, protectins and maresins from EPA and DHA, which support the defence against pathogens and tissue regeneration without suppressing the immune response.
MUMultiple species
Review: the NLRP3 inflammasome recognises both foreign patterns from pathogens and the body's own danger signals from damaged cells, then assembles and steers the maturation and release of interleukin-1 and interleukin-18; it is involved in numerous chronic inflammatory conditions.
MUMultiple species
The review argues that severe equine asthma serves as a naturally occurring model of dust-related asthma in humans, because irritant, course and tissue changes largely coincide.
MUMultiple species
Human asthma mostly runs eosinophilic, the severe equine form by contrast neutrophilic; that is precisely why it is drawn on as a model for the hard-to-treat neutrophilic asthma of humans.
HOHorse
Segregation analyses in the offspring of two affected Warmblood stallions and in 401 Swiss Warmbloods support a mixed inheritance model with one major gene, whose expression remains tied to hay exposure.
SPSpecies-independent
Introduces the GRADE framework and makes the case for a strict separation between the certainty of the evidence (four levels) and the strength of a recommendation.
SPSpecies-independent
Argues that systematic reviews and meta-analyses are not the top level of the pyramid but the tool with which the levels beneath them are read.
MUMultiple species
Secondary analysis of the placebo groups: a literature review found six placebo-controlled studies, five of them with usable data on 96 cats; 54 to 74 per cent counted as a success in the owners’ judgement, but only 10 to 63 per cent by objectively measured activity.
SPSpecies-independent
Between 1991 and 2014 the number of systematic reviews published each year rose by 2,728 per cent, against 153 per cent for all indexed papers; on antidepressants alone, 185 meta-analyses appeared between 2007 and 2014, and the author holds the majority of this output to be redundant or misleading.
HUHuman
Argues that the rigid evidence pyramid is unsuited to safety questions after authorisation, and proposes a hierarchy-free model in which randomised and real-world care data complement each other.
HOHorse
Narrative review that separates three forms of laminitis and proposes stress of the basal cells as a shared core process, explicitly as a hypothesis, noting that many ponies with pasture laminitis show the pattern of disturbed insulin regulation.
SPSpecies-independent
Review of the variability of water-soluble carbohydrates: across the measurement series the rise from morning to evening runs from minus 20 to plus 74 grams per kilogram of dry matter, and the author explicitly advises against deriving a rule from any single factor.
HOHorse
This narrative review holds that soaking and steaming improve hygienic quality but lower nutritional value and therefore call for compensation, and that the most critical point of environmental control is the fidelity with which owners and keepers carry it out.
HOHorse
Narrative review: it records that the true frequency of pain caused by touching spinous processes remains speculative, that no agreement between the imaging finding and clinical signs could be shown, and that the way the condition arises remains poorly understood despite decades of treatments on offer.
HOHorse
In seven horses without complaints, traction on the abdomen widened the spaces from the eleventh thoracic to the second lumbar vertebra with a single exception; the work was intended as a surgical aid and shows independently that posture at the moment of exposure helps determine the measurement.
HOHorse
Telephone advice for colic varied considerably between practices, most of all on movement and safety, and practice teams named sweating and recumbency as the most important signs of critical cases recognisable by phone.
HOHorse
Narrative review of the epidemiology of colic: it holds that colic is not a single disease but a syndrome of abdominal pain with several underlying disease processes and a multifactorial origin, and it sets prevention, diagnosis and research gaps in context.
HOHorse
Qualitative interview study: those who had never looked after a crib-biting horse named copying as a strong theme and did not want such a horse, while those who had one did not believe in it on the strength of their own observation; the dominant explanations were boredom, stress and habit.
HOHorse
Narrative review: the boredom explanation is too general, the majority of stereotypies begin in the month after weaning, copying between horses has neither direct nor indirect support, and surgical or pharmacological prevention should not be attempted before the underlying causes have been removed.
HOHorse
From 26 pieces of work published between 2009 and 2025: haynets and slow feeders lengthen eating time by around 40 per cent and clearly lower feed waste, a decline in crib-biting and weaving is reported qualitatively, while devices that restrict too strongly or hang too high cause frustration and more tension in the neck muscles; the work is declared semi-systematic, without any assessment of the risk of bias.
HOHorse
Narrative review of diagnostics: egg counts cannot estimate the host's worm burden, as they relate neither to the number of small strongyles nor to that of Anoplocephala perfoliata, which is why the authors call for antibody-based methods; three co-authors are employed by the manufacturer of the tests discussed.
HOHorse
This review states that a general benefit of probiotics in horses is currently unsupported by data, that well-built studies are rare and contradictory and that the labels of over-the-counter products often fail to reflect the actual contents.
HOHorse
This review states that the high variation of the faecal microbiome, within one horse as well as between horses, has to this day prevented a clear definition of dysbiosis and that for no disease of the horse has an unambiguous causal link with dysbiosis been shown.
HOHorse
Narrative review without data of its own: the umbrella term has been in use since 1999, the separation of the two forms was formalised in 2015, and a large share of the work on the glandular form appeared only afterwards.
HOHorse
Editorial without data of its own: it does not dispute that gastric lesions hurt, but warns against moving automatically from behaviour to the stomach, noting among other things that 25 and 31 per cent respectively of horses carrying a squamous or a glandular lesion were girth-sensitive, and that 84 per cent of 275 racehorses referred for declining performance had more than one possible cause.
HOHorse
When 60 anonymised gastroscopy videos were assessed by six people, agreement with the ordinal system of the EGUS Council was substantial and largely independent of experience level, while a visual analogue scale performed clearly worse, especially for the glandular mucosa.
HOHorse
Clinical commentary without data of its own: it describes how problem behaviours can persist in some horses as learnt, anticipatory pain responses after healing confirmed on gastroscopy, while another part gives way after treatment.
HUHuman
Review: less than one to two per cent of body magnesium sits in the blood and the extracellular space, no single marker reliably reflects whole-body stores, and the serum value can miss a subclinical depletion.
HUHuman
Comprehensive review: magnesium is a cofactor in more than 600 enzyme reactions; body stores are governed by the gut, the kidney and bone, and several drug classes, among them proton pump inhibitors and diuretics, can trigger hypomagnesaemia.
MUMultiple species
Review of renal physiology: most reabsorption runs passively between the cells through claudin pores, while the fine tuning happens in the distal tubule via the TRPM6 and TRPM7 channels.
MUMultiple species
Review of the ruminant: magnesium is taken up predominantly across the rumen wall, high potassium concentrations in the rumen inhibit this voltage-dependent transport, and no hormonal feedback system for magnesium exists.
HOHorse
Narrative review: pastern dermatitis is a non-specific reaction pattern of the skin of the distal limbs and not a diagnosis; the link with Chorioptes infestation and with a disturbed skin flora is found consistently, that with fungal infections is not, and causation is established for no agent.
HOHorse
Clinical review by a single author: pastern dermatitis should be handled as a syndrome and not as a diagnosis, and determining the underlying cause before treatment is said to be the key to fewer treatment failures, an expert opinion that has never been tested in a trial.
MUMultiple species
A data compilation covering 37 herbivore species shows that equids, kangaroos and rabbits produce little methane relative to body size, intake and retention time, and that the split into foregut and hindgut fermenters does not explain the differences.
MUMultiple species
The review states that concentrations of short-chain fatty acids in digesta or faeces are no measure of their production or absorption rate, and that results without dose-response and time-course experiments can be misleading.
HUHuman
The review estimates the contribution of colonic fermentation to human energy supply at 5 to 10 per cent and explicitly sets it apart from the considerably higher share in herbivores; still the authoritative reference value today.
HOHorse
The most recent review of the risk factors describes a complex autoimmune origin with environmental and hereditary components and records that the primary triggers are still being sought; it is a narrative review without a search protocol and without an assessment of the risk of bias.
MUMultiple species
Brief review: the causes are multiple, with leptospiral infection and hereditary predisposition regarded as the most important risk factors, and irrespective of the trigger it is the repeated disturbance of the blood-ocular barrier that sustains the disease, while the immune response spreads to further structures of the body itself.
HOHorse
Argumentative commentary without new data: at the upper jaw the soft tissue could make the actual tightness appear less than it is, and changing the site of measurement without revalidating the method would make the figures incomparable; five of the eight signatories are connected with the organisation that distributes the research gauge.
HOHorse
Reply without new experimental data: the two gauges increase the circumference of the strap by 3.2 against 3.4 centimetres and leave practically the same amount of room, older requirements themselves referred to one finger at the side, and the authors accuse the opposing side of an undeclared conflict of interest.
HOHorse
Narrative review without data of its own: it argues that a practice should not be treated as harmless for as long as its harmlessness has not been shown, and cites over-tightened nosebands as an example of equipment with unavoidable pressure.
HOHorse
Collective letter from seven specialists without data of its own; no abstract is held in the register, so that it serves here solely to establish that the trot measurement was formally challenged in the same journal.
HOHorse
Collective letter from seven specialists without data of its own; no abstract is held in the register, so that it serves here solely to establish that the chewing study too was formally challenged in the same journal.
HOHorse
Reply from the challenged author group, without data of its own; no abstract is held in the register, so that it serves here solely to establish that the criticism received a published response.
HOHorse
Reply from the challenged author group, without data of its own; no abstract is held in the register, so that it serves here solely to establish that this criticism too received a published response.
HOHorse
A review without declared inclusion criteria: it records that REM sleep occurs only in lateral or sternal recumbency because of muscle atonia, and documents that published sleep durations depend massively on the method of measurement (172 to 262 minutes with brain-wave recording, 65 to 382 minutes in behavioural observation).
RORodent
In the rodent it is experimentally established that muscle atonia in REM sleep requires several inhibitory messenger systems at once, and that their failure produces either REM sleep with tone preserved or loss of tone during waking; in the horse this mechanism has never been tested.
MUMultiple species
Published sleep durations in mammals depend markedly on laboratory conditions; if only data gathered in standardised fashion are used, the classical functional explanations of sleep no longer hold, and the short sleeper named among the equids, with roughly three hours, is the donkey and not the horse.
OTOther animal species
A protocol without findings of its own: it establishes verifiably that no systematic mapping of the literature on the sleep of farmed ungulates existed as of 2026; the horse is not named explicitly in it.
HOHorse
Narrative review: five validated gene tests exist for muscle diseases of the horse, and gene tests in veterinary medicine are not regulated, which is why every newly offered test must be carefully evaluated and confirmed as valid before it is used.
HOHorse
Narrative review: PSSM1 is an autosomal dominantly inherited storage disease in more than twenty breeds with an available gene test, whereas the PSSM2 form described in the Quarter Horse is established through muscle biopsy because its genetic basis is unknown.
HOHorse
Narrative review: myofibrillar myopathy no longer counts as a storage disease but as a disease of its own, with segmental disarray of the myofibrils and ectopic desmin accumulation, comprising an endurance Arabian form with raised muscle enzymes and a Warmblood form with pain behaviour and normal muscle enzymes.
HOHorse
Narrative review: muscle biopsy is often needed for a definitive diagnosis of neuromuscular disease, but assessing it requires experienced pathologists who connect the picture with signalment, history and clinical data.
MUMultiple species
The first standardised criteria for judging the disease causing role of variants in animals, expressly justified by the fact that breeding decisions based on invalid DNA tests can damage a population in the long term and, in the individual animal, lead to the wrong treatment or to a life ending decision.
HOHorse
Narrative appraisal: spontaneous regression of the sarcoid is said to be an exceptional event confined to mild occult and at most verrucous lesions, since the series with many regressions rest on clinically made diagnoses without histological confirmation; as triggers the author names bovine papillomavirus types 1 and 2 and probably 13 together with skin injury and genetic predisposition.
HOHorse
Founding work for the concept of abortive infection: most sarcoids contain viral genetic material and messenger RNA and produce the transforming protein E5 of types 1 and 2, but apparently produce no infectious viral particles; the route of transmission was unexplained at the time of the review.
HOHorse
Narrative review without a systematic search: there is no curative treatment, care remains lifelong and costly, the scoring systems were still undergoing validation, and the 2018 trial is described here independently as randomised, double-blind and placebo-controlled.
OTOther animal species
Dogs in the placebo arm were rated as improved by their keepers over six months, whereas dogs that were merely observed were rated as worse, while the tests carried out on site did not change: the study frame itself influences the keepers' judgement.
MUMultiple species
Perspective article from the same developer group without data of its own: it proposes developing an analogous vaccine against asthma in humans, draws on mouse and horse data and documents no existing clinical programme.
MUMultiple species
Simulations based on 440 preclinical studies of 13 interventions: single-laboratory designs mostly failed to estimate effect sizes accurately, and larger samples made this worse still; designs with two to four laboratories raised accuracy by up to 42 percentage points.
MUMultiple species
Review: scaling by body size fails for strongly protein-bound, extensively metabolised, actively transported or biliary excreted substances, and where species differ in the quantity, binding strength and distribution of the target structures.
HOHorse
Review: the horse comes closer to human cartilage and subchondral bone thickness than the usual models; defects can be created and followed up arthroscopically, and loading after treatment can be controlled.
MUMultiple species
Workshop review: the horse’s superficial digital flexor tendon is regarded as the naturally diseasing counterpart of human Achilles tendinopathy, and tears of the deep digital flexor tendon as the counterpart of rotator cuff tears within the tendon sheath; the authors recommend transferring the study methodology of human medicine to equine studies.
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