Ulcers

Hi Everyone!

A friend of mine owns a horse that I believe has ulcers. I've never had to deal with a horse with them before so I don't know much about them. I'm open to all and any info anyone has. Thanks!

Remove all grains from diet, alfalfa hay has been proven to sooth them, ulcergaurd will help as well...

Yeah Ulcerguard does help. We have a couple horses that came to our barn that have ulcers, we feed Ulcerguard to them and it helped alot

Get away from grains!!! Go grain free! If it is a severe case I would also use ulcerguard, but if you can get him to eat hay and if he needs it a grain free feed and he starts to turn around then you can get away without doing it. I do not use the ulcerguard unless I have a bad case of ulcers. I have just recently went through this with our mini stallion and it taught me a lot that no medical book could. There was a lot of trial and error before, thanks to Peggysue, I found a ration balancer and it solved all my problems and even started to feed it to all my horses. I really like this article on ulcers
Gastric Stomach Ulcers in Horses

While you may see a decrease in symptoms just by changing the diet, treatment is still necessary to actually allow the ulcers to heal because a horse's stomach produces gastric acid all the time rather than just on demand like humans. Ulcergard may help reduce symtpoms as well, but it is not a high enough dose of omeprazole to treat ulcers. So, if you suspect ulcers you and your friend should talk to the vet about options for diagnosis and treatment.

Gastroguard (higher dose of omeprazole than ulcergard which is the preventative dosing), ranitidine or cimetadine are the 3 drugs that can be used to treat ulcers.

Free choice forage, remove grains, choose forage based supplemental feeds if needed (senior feeds or especially ration balancers are a good choice), eliminate work load during treatment....

You can go to www.thehorse.com and do a search for gastric ulcers and come up with tons of articles on gastric ulcers. Here are a couple of them:
The Horse: Tummy Troubles: Equine Gastric Ulcer Syndrome
The Horse: Gastric Ulcers

Thank you everyone. I will pass this information on. I'm going to try and get her to sign up to be able to come onto this forum. It's a great source of information.

Now I keep hearing everyone talking about the ration balancers, who makes that feed?

If you do a search for threads started by ME you will find one all about them and the companies that make them dealer locators!! Good luck and let me know if you need help finding one

Here you go
What is a ration balancer and where can you find one?

Hi everyone, Thanks for the info on ulcers. My friends mare is doing much better now. She has been on zantax for about a week now after speaking with the equine hospital about it. And has purked up and starting to eat more.

You can also search this forum and you will find more info.