The applicability of ambulatory electroencephalography (AEEG) in healthy horses and horses with abnormal behaviour or clinical signs of epilepsy.

The research article is about a study that explores the use of ambulatory electroencephalography (AEEG) in diagnosing brain abnormalities in horses, both healthy and those with abnormal behavior or signs of epilepsy.

Objective and Approach

• The main goal of this research was to ascertain if AEEG (a method usually used in humans to monitor brain activity) can be applied to unsedated horses in order to identify abnormal brain activity.
• The researchers achieved this by conducting AEEG recordings on a sample of eight healthy adult horses and ten horses suspected of having brain abnormalities.
• The AEEG recordings were collected using self-adhesive electrodes and the ‘Porti-5’ recording system, with specific filter settings, and recorded over a time period ranging from 5 to 49 hours. These recordings were then analyzed offline.

Findings

• In the control group of healthy horses, one displayed abnormal brain activity as per the AEEG recording.
• In the patient group, six out of nine horses exhibited abnormal brain activity during the recordings.
• Among those, with the help of Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), an intracranial mass was confirmed in one patient.
• The finding suggests that long-term, high-quality AEEG recordings can be gathered from non-sedated horses carrying out their everyday activities, offering a reasonable probability of capturing abnormal brain activity that indicates seizures or epilepsy, even in the absence of explicit clinical signs or seizures.

Conclusions

• This study concludes that AEEG is a potentially viable diagnostic tool for detecting brain abnormalities in horses.
• The researchers argue that abnormal behavior in horses can be expressed intermittently and the availability of AEEG provides an additional diagnostic tool in these cases.