Neuroproteins could improve diagnosis of Neonatal Maladjustment Syndrome in foals

   

 The first few hours after birth are critical for every foal. While most are on their feet and nursing within a short time, others fail to recognise their dam, cannot suckle properly or develop alarming neurological signs. Distinguishing neonatal maladjustment syndrome (NMS) from other serious conditions can be challenging, but new research suggests that naturally occurring proteins in the blood may provide veterinarians with valuable clues.

A study recently published in the Journal of Veterinary Internal Medicine found that several neuroproteins and neurosteroids differ between healthy foals and those affected by NMS, raising the possibility of more accurate diagnosis and improved monitoring of this complex neurological disorder, sometimes known as "dummy foal syndrome."

Neonatal maladjustment syndrome is a complex condition that usually develops at birth or within the first two days of life. Although the exact cause remains uncertain, many affected foals recover if serious brain injury during foaling can be ruled out and they receive appropriate supportive care.

Clinical signs vary widely. The most common problem is failure to develop a normal suckling reflex, making it difficult for foals to nurse. More severely affected foals may become disorientated, develop seizures or even lapse into a coma. Treatment is largely supportive, often involving tube feeding or teaching the foal to drink from a bucket until it is able to nurse normally, together with intensive veterinary care where needed.

Researchers from North Carolina State University investigated whether naturally occurring substances associated with the brain could provide useful biological markers of the disease. They focused on three neuroproteins: brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP) and S100B, a protein produced mainly by astrocytes, specialised cells that support nerve cells within the brain.

These biomarkers are already used in human medicine to investigate neurological disorders, including neonatal brain injury, but their potential role in equine medicine has received little attention.

The study followed 72 foals less than seven days old. Fourteen were healthy, 19 had NMS and 39 were hospitalised with other conditions, including sepsis, diarrhoea and prematurity. Blood samples were collected on admission and again after one and two days in hospital. Of the 58 hospitalised foals, 48 survived.

The researchers also measured concentrations of progesterone-derived neurosteroids, known as pregnanes. These compounds are present at high concentrations in healthy newborn foals immediately after birth but normally fall rapidly within the first 24 to 48 hours. Previous studies have suggested that foals with NMS continue to have elevated concentrations for much longer.

That pattern was confirmed. Pregnane concentrations remained significantly higher in foals with NMS than in both healthy foals and those hospitalised for other illnesses throughout the first 48 hours.

The research team also found important differences in the neuroproteins. Blood concentrations of BDNF fell during the first day of hospitalisation in foals with NMS. S100B concentrations were particularly high in septic foals that also had NMS, compared with septic foals without neurological disease. GFAP concentrations were lower in both NMS foals and other sick foals than in healthy newborns, suggesting it may be less useful as a specific marker for the condition.

Lead researcher Dr Katarzyna Dembek believes the findings are encouraging. She suggests that BDNF, S100B and pregnanes could become valuable biomarkers not only for neonatal maladjustment syndrome, but also for identifying neurological involvement in premature foals and those with sepsis.

However, the authors caution that the work represents an early step rather than a new diagnostic test. The study involved relatively small numbers of foals, and further research will be needed to establish normal reference ranges, determine how these biomarkers change during recovery and evaluate how reliably they can distinguish NMS from other neurological disorders in clinical practice.

If confirmed in larger studies, measuring neuroproteins alongside neurosteroids could provide veterinarians with a more objective way of assessing newborn foals with suspected neurological disease, allowing earlier diagnosis and potentially improving treatment decisions during the critical first days of life.

For more details, see:

Javier Perez Quesada, Kinnidy Coley, David Wong, Nimet Browne, Myriah Albrecht, Katarzyna Dembek,

Biomarkers of brain injury in foals with neonatal maladjustment syndrome, 

Journal of Veterinary Internal Medicine, (2026) Vol 40, (5) aalag228

https://doi.org/10.1093/jvimsj/aalag228

University of Liverpool Healthy Horse AMR Project

(c) Avrezn. Dreamstime.com

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is one of the biggest challenges facing both human and veterinary
medicine. As bacteria become resistant to antibiotics, infections become increasingly difficult to treat, highlighting the need to monitor how resistant organisms emerge and spread.

While national surveillance programmes already track antimicrobial resistance in livestock, there is currently no equivalent scheme for healthy horses in the UK. Researchers at the University of Liverpool hope to address this gap and are inviting horse owners, trainers, carers and others responsible for horses in England to take part in a new study.

Healthy horses can carry antibiotic-resistant bacteria without showing any signs of illness. These bacteria include methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and strains of Escherichia coli that are resistant to important antibiotics, including cephalosporins. Because resistant bacteria can spread between animals, people and the environment, identifying them in healthy horses could provide an early warning of emerging resistance before it becomes a wider health problem.

The Healthy Horse AMR project, led by researchers at the University of Liverpool's Institute of Infection, Veterinary and Ecological Sciences, aims to establish how common antimicrobial resistance is in healthy horses in England. The findings will provide valuable baseline data and help develop practical, sustainable methods for monitoring resistance in the equine population.

The research team is also investigating the clinical and environmental factors that contribute to the development and spread of antimicrobial resistance, alongside the development of new antimicrobial treatment strategies.

Horse owners can support the project by collecting a faecal sample from their horse using a free sampling kit supplied by the researchers and returning it to the laboratory by post.

To be eligible, horses must be kept in England, must not be receiving antibiotics at the time of sampling and must not have been admitted to hospital during the previous 10 days.

The team is also recruiting a small number of horses to take part in a related nasal swab study. Owners interested in either study can register through the project's online sign-up form.

For more details, see:

https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/infection-veterinary-and-ecological-sciences/research/healthy-horse-amr/

Vets with Horsepower raise more than £100,000

  

More than £100,000 raised by the Vets with Horsepower team during its 2026 European charity tour has now been distributed to the organisations it supports.

The annual initiative sees a team of equine veterinarians travel by motorcycle to equine veterinary centres across Europe, delivering continuing professional development (CPD) lectures while raising money for projects that improve the lives of animals and children worldwide.

This year's tour took the team through Germany, Poland and the Baltic states. Funds were raised through lecture admission fees, sponsorship and donations, with all proceeds going to charity.

Although the tour has ended, there is still an opportunity to support the project. Recordings of the educational webinars remain available in return for a modest donation. The programme includes approximately 15 hours of CPD for veterinary surgeons and eight hours of presentations for horse owners. 

Any additional income generated through webinar sales or further donations will be added to the funds distributed to the charities supported by next year's tour.

The team has already announced plans for its 2027 expedition, which will take place in Iberia in September. Among the causes it hopes to support are veterinarians working in Ukraine, alongside its ongoing charitable work benefiting animals and children around the world.

Further information about the webinars and opportunities to support the project is available at www.vetswithhorsepower.com

Miniature horses and donkeys help lift teens’ mood

  

 For many people, spending time with horses has a calming effect. 

Animal-assisted therapy programmes often rely on this, but new research suggests that the animals are far more than passive participants. The way horses and donkeys respond to people may influence how much benefit people gain from the interaction.

Researchers at the University of California, Davis, investigated this idea in a study involving 61 adolescents and a small herd of rescued miniature horses and donkeys. Their findings, published in Scientific Reports, provide evidence for what the researchers call the "Two-Way Hypothesis" – the idea that human behaviour influences an animal's behaviour, which in turn affects the person's emotional response.

Previous studies of animal-assisted interventions have largely concentrated on the effects on people while paying relatively little attention to the animals' experiences. Lead author Rebecca Calisi Rodríguez believes this overlooks an important part of the relationship.

"You can't stand in a pasture watching a child and a donkey interact and pretend only one of them is having an experience," she said. "They're watching each other, they're responding to each other, they're both making choices."

To test the hypothesis, each teenager spent three minutes interacting with miniature horses and donkeys. Half the participants were instructed to gently stroke the animals' backs, while the remainder scratched their necks in a way that mimics the mutual grooming behaviour seen between horses. Before the interaction, the adolescents were taught to recognise two simple behavioural signals: lip wriggling, which indicates enjoyment, and walking away, which suggests the animal wants more space.

The style of handling affected how the equines responded. Neck scratching produced lip-wriggling behaviour much more frequently than gentle stroking, while animals walked away less often during scratching sessions than during petting.

All participants reported feeling calmer and less nervous, sad, lonely and excited after spending time with the animals, regardless of which handling method they used. However, differences emerged when researchers considered the animals' behaviour.

Teenagers who observed lip wriggling experienced greater reductions in feelings of loneliness. Surprisingly, those whose equine partner chose to walk away showed larger reductions in sadness.

This unexpected finding suggests that an interaction does not have to involve constant engagement from the animal to be beneficial. Instead, seeing an animal exercise choice may make the encounter feel more genuine.

"I love that this unexpected result challenges the assumption that more animal engagement is always better," said Calisi Rodríguez. "Seeing an animal exercise choice – being free to approach you, stay with you, or walk away – may make the interaction feel more authentic."

The researchers stress that the study does not show that neck scratching is always the best way to interact with horses or donkeys. Rather, it demonstrates that human behaviour influences the animal's response, and that these responses are linked with differences in people's emotional outcomes.

The work could have practical implications for animal-assisted interventions in schools, hospitals and therapeutic riding centres. Rather than focusing solely on the human participant, future programmes may benefit from paying greater attention to the animal's experience and allowing it to make choices during interactions.

As Calisi Rodríguez concluded, "If animals are going to become increasingly important partners in supporting human well-being, then understanding their well-being isn't just an ethical responsibility. Our work suggests it may actually be part of understanding how these interventions work."

Everyday management linked to horse personality

  

Credit: Océane Liehrmann, University of Turku

Why do some horses eagerly approach people while others remain wary? Why are some calm and attentive, while
others are more reactive to unfamiliar situations? Although genetics and breed play an important role, new research suggests that everyday management and the relationships horses develop with people may also be linked to their personalities.

The study, led by Dr Océane Liehrmann of the University of Turku, Finland, and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, investigated how everyday management practices are associated with personality traits in horses. The findings, published in Royal Society Open Science, highlight the possible importance of housing, handling and owner relationships for equine welfare.

The relationship between humans and horses has developed over thousands of years of domestication. Today, horses live almost entirely in environments created by people, making it important to understand how management may affect behaviour and welfare.

Like people, horses show consistent individual differences in behaviour, often referred to as personality. Previous research has shown that personality has a genetic component and can influence welfare, trainability and the quality of human-horse interactions. However, less has been known about the role of everyday management.

To investigate this, researchers analysed responses from an online questionnaire completed by 2,257 owners describing 2,767 horses from Europe, North America and other regions. Owners completed a 52-question assessment of their horse's personality and provided information about housing, riding frequency, groundwork, time spent with the horse, ownership history, relationship duration and headgear use. The researchers also accounted for factors such as the horse's age, sex and breed.

Statistical analysis identified four broad personality dimensions. “Human sociability” described a horse's tendency to seek and enjoy interaction with people. “Horse sociability” reflected how readily a horse engaged in friendly, non-aggressive interactions with other horses. “Attentiveness” referred to the horse's ability to focus on and respond to human cues, while “neuroticism” described emotional reactivity and sensitivity to stress.

As expected, age, sex and breed all influenced personality scores. For example, geldings generally scored higher than mares for both human sociability and attentiveness, while warmbloods tended to score higher for neuroticism than draft horses.

Several management factors were also associated with personality. Horses that had remained with the same owner for more than ten years tended to have higher human sociability scores than horses with newer owners. Conversely, horses that had changed owners several times generally scored lower. Spending relaxed, undemanding time with horses, such as simply being with them or grooming and scratching them, was also associated with greater human sociability.

Riding frequency was linked with two personality traits. Horses ridden regularly, between four and seven times each week, tended to score higher for attentiveness and lower for neuroticism than horses ridden less often. However, the researchers emphasise that this does not prove that frequent riding produces calmer horses. It is equally possible that naturally calmer horses are selected for more regular work.

Housing was strongly associated with horse sociability. Horses kept alone consistently scored lower than horses housed with companions, whether in pairs or larger groups. This finding may reflect reduced opportunities to express normal social behaviour, although it is also possible that horses with poorer social skills are more likely to be housed individually.

The researchers stress that the study identifies associations rather than cause-and-effect relationships. Because it examined horses at a single point in time, it cannot determine whether management influences personality, personality influences management decisions, or whether both occur together.

Nevertheless, the findings suggest that stable ownership, opportunities for social contact with other horses and positive interactions with people are all associated with differences in equine personality. Further long-term studies should help clarify how management practices and personality influence one another and whether changes in management could improve both horse welfare and human-horse relationships.

 

For more details, see:

Alisa Viitanen, Aada Ståhl, Milla K. Salonen, Océane Liehrmann;

Management practices and human–horse relationships are associated with horse personality traits. 

R. Soc. Open Sci. (2026); 13 (9): 260116.

https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.260116

Developing AI to detect pain in horses

  

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Recognising pain in horses is one of the greatest challenges facing veterinarians and owners.
As a prey species, horses instinctively mask signs of discomfort to avoid appearing vulnerable, meaning even experienced clinicians can struggle to identify pain in its early stages. New research from an international team of scientists has developed an artificial intelligence (AI) system that could eventually provide an additional tool to help monitor equine welfare.

The researchers, led by Dr Marcelo Feighelstein of Tel Hai University, Israel, have developed a new AI framework called SHIC-XE (Stable Heatmap Integration and Comparison for Explainable AI). Unlike previous AI systems, SHIC-XE not only detects signs that may indicate pain in horses but also provides a clear explanation of how it reached its conclusions.

Current AI systems often use coloured "heat maps" to show which parts of an image influenced a decision. While these can work reasonably well with still photographs, they become unreliable when analysing video. As the horse or camera moves, the highlighted areas can flicker from one frame to the next, making it difficult to understand exactly what the AI is using to identify pain.

SHIC-XE overcomes this limitation by mapping video images onto a stable three-dimensional model of the horse's face. This allows the system to keep its focus on the same anatomical structures, even when the horse changes head position or is viewed from different angles. Rather than producing inconsistent heat maps, the AI consistently relates its decisions to specific facial regions.

Importantly, the researchers showed that the AI concentrated on areas that experienced veterinarians also regard as important indicators of discomfort, particularly the ears and cheek muscles. By comparing the AI's attention with scores from a validated equine pain scale, they demonstrated meaningful agreement between the model and expert assessments.

This represents one of the first studies to provide a quantitative measure of whether an AI explanation matches established veterinary knowledge, rather than relying solely on subjective visual interpretation. The work also highlights that previous claims about the clinical usefulness of AI explanations may need further validation if they were based only on visual inspection.

The system was evaluated using three separate datasets containing videos of horses showing different levels of pain. Its performance was measured using an F1 score, which combines two important measures: how often the system correctly identified horses in pain and how often it avoided incorrectly classifying horses as being in pain. An F1 score of 1.00 would represent perfect performance, while a score of 0 would indicate very poor performance. The system achieved scores of 0.67, 0.80 and 0.70 across the three datasets, suggesting that it performed reasonably well, although it was not perfect.

The researchers used leave-one-subject-out validation, meaning that the system was tested on horses whose videos had not been used to train it. This provides a stronger indication of whether the AI can work with unfamiliar horses rather than simply memorising the animals in its training data.

The researchers stress that the technology is intended to support, rather than replace, veterinary judgement. In the future, AI could provide continuous monitoring in stables, veterinary hospitals or during transport, alerting staff when a horse's behaviour suggests developing pain, even when no one is actively observing it.

Although the current system simply identifies the presence of pain, the research team hopes future versions may be able to estimate pain severity and perhaps distinguish between different causes, such as orthopaedic injury, inflammation or post-operative discomfort. However, these capabilities remain future goals and have not yet been demonstrated.

While SHIC-XE was developed using horses, the underlying approach could have much wider applications. Similar techniques may eventually assist with pain assessment in other animal species and even in human patients who cannot communicate verbally, such as newborn babies or sedated intensive care patients. For equine medicine, however, the research represents an important step towards AI systems that are not only accurate, but also transparent enough for veterinarians to understand and trust.

 

For more details, see:

Marcelo Feighelstein, Omer Bibi, Ofer Rozenbaum, Nathali Adrielli Agassi De Sales, Guilherme Camargo Ferraz, Ilan Shimshoni, Dirk van der Linden, Emanuela Dalla Costa, Annika Bremhorst, Claudia Spadavecchia & Anna Zamansky 

SHIC-XE: Viewpoint-Invariant Explainability via Dense 2D-3D Correspondences: an Application to Equine Pain Recognition. 

Int J Comput Vis (2026) 134, 342

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-026-02910-3