Effect of head and tail rope‐assisted recovery of horses after elective and emergency surgery under general anaesthesia

Abstract

The recovery phase is a critical period during equine anaesthesia. In an attempt to reduce the risk of recovery, several recovery systems, including head and tail ropes, have been developed over time. However, the clinical safety and efficacy of these systems have not been compared to a nonassisted group in a larger study. The objective of this comparative, retrospective, nonrandomised single-centre study was to determine whether the risk of developing fatal and nonfatal complications after general anaesthesia is reduced in horses assisted with head and tail ropes during recovery compared with horses recovering unassisted. Included were all horses undergoing general anaesthesia at

Recovery after General Anaesthesia in Adult Horses: A Structured Summary of the Literature

“…Anaesthetic-related mortality rates up to seven days after surgery is higher in colics compared with elective procedures (11.7 versus 0.9%) [1]. Nicolaisen et al, (2021) even showed that colic horses are at higher risk to die during recovery when compared to elective and non-nonemergency abdominal procedures [323]. Accordingly, in a further study, recoveries were worse after emergency exploratory laparotomies than those after elective surgeries in dorsal recumbency [371].…”

“…Head and tail rope assistance is the most frequently used assistance technique [68,69]. Three studies in this review compared the head and tail rope system to unassisted recovery [321][322][323]. Head and tail ropes improved the recovery quality after short elective procedures, which was not shown after long emergency abdominal surgeries [321,322].…”

“…Eighteen publications reported different systems to recover horses from general anaesthesia [317][318][319][320][321][322][323][324][325][326][327][328][329][330][331][332][333][334].…”

“…The main differences between the two studies were the type of intervention, health status of the horses, duration of anaesthesia and the training level of the person leading the head rope. Nicolaisen et al, (2021) concluded that assistance using head and tail ropes reduces the risk of fatal complications during recovery after emergency abdominal surgery [323]. However, these results should be interpreted with caution, as horses in the assisted group were more frequently sedated for recovery, which would very likely affect the quality of recovery.…”

“…Larger prospective randomised studies are needed to further investigate the benefits of rope assisted recovery. However, what is clear is that head and tail ropes do not completely prevent the occurrence of fractures during recovery [321][322][323]332], with a suspicion that breeds such as warmblood and in general heavier horses may benefit from this technique [321,323]. Criteria to recover horses with head and tail ropes were hypoxaemia, hypotension, old age, endotoxaemia or hypothermia [54].…”