Dr Gaby Van Galen at Goulburn Valley Equine Hospital said it was in a horse’s nature to hide illness.
“If you go back to when they were not domesticated, if they showed that they were sick they would be eaten,” Dr Van Galen said.
Signs of ulcers that can appear include difficulty keeping weight on, a dull coat, picky eating and reacting to a girth, but Dr Van Galen said that she had also seen many horses with ulcers that displayed no symptoms at all.
Dr Van Galen said that a test that determined how much pain a horse was in “would be very helpful”.
Researchers from Adelaide University investigated whether immune cells could provide a measurable signal of equine gastric ulcer syndrome.
The blood test exposed immune cells to a substance designed to trigger an immune response then measured the production of a molecule called Interleukin-1 beta, which has been linked to pain and inflammation in other species.
The test could not reliably distinguish between horses that had the disease and those that did not.
“Our study shows that this particular blood test is not yet the solution, but it also gives us important information about where we need to look next,” Dr Gustavo Ferlini Agne of Adelaide University said.
“This is an important step because knowing what doesn’t work is just as valuable as identifying a promising test,” he said.
The researchers found that only 25 per cent of horses showed a measurable response and there was no significant association with the presence of EGUS.
Facial pain scores, an assessment of pain based on a horse’s expression, did not show a significant difference between horses that responded to the test and the ones that did not.
The researchers have stressed that these findings do not indicate that gastric ulcers do not cause pain. Instead, it indicates that testing an immune response in the blood may not be a sensitive enough test.
EGUS is very common in horses, particularly in the thoroughbred racing industry, with previous research finding gastric disease in between 80 and 100 per cent of racehorses.
“The next challenge is to develop approaches that are better suited to horses and combine biological measures with careful assessment of pain-related behaviour and inflammation,” Dr Ferlini Agne said.
