news 2012

Headshaking syndrome is when a horse shakes or jerks its head uncontrollably for no apparent reason. There are striking clinical similarities between facial pain syndromes in people, most notably trigeminal neuralgia, and headshaking in horses. Although some progress has been made towards both diagnosing and treating the condition in horses, the pathology of the disease remains unknown and further research is needed.

Dogs with hemangiosarcoma that were treated with a compound derived from the Coriolus versicolor mushroom had the longest survival times ever reported for dogs with the disease. These promising findings offer hope that the compound may one day offer cancer patients - human and canine alike - a viable alternative or complementary treatment to traditional chemotherapies.

In a two-day-old mouse, a heart attack causes active stem cells to grow new heart cells; a few months later, the heart is mostly repaired. But in an adult mouse, recovery from such an attack leads to classic after-effects: scar tissue, permanent loss of function and life-threatening arrhythmias.

Aspects of a horse training method made famous by Monty Roberts, author of the The Man Who Listens to Horses , have been called into question by research at the University of Sydney. "This training technique was popularised worldwide by Roberts as the Join-Up method and was used by him to train Queen Elizabeth's horses at her personal request," said Cath Henshall, a Master of Animal Science candidate in the Faculty of Veterinary Science at the University.

With no guidelines on how best to perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation on pets, only 6 percent of dogs and cats that suffer cardiac arrests in the hospital survive to go home. Now the Reassessment Campaign on Veterinary Resuscitation, or RECOVER, offers the first evidence-based recommendations to resuscitate dogs and cats in cardiac arrest.

The management of influenza outbreaks in horses will directly benefit from research by the Faculty of Veterinary Science at the University of Sydney. "We have demonstrated in non-laboratory conditions how air temperature, humidity and wind velocity influence the spread of influenza viruses. It puts us in a much better position to understand an actual outbreak of influenza in horse populations, under natural conditions," said Navneet Dhand , the principal investigator of the research project.