Texas Equine Veterinary Association

www.texasequineva.com • 18 by Alicia Foley, DVM ABOUT THE AUTHOR Alicia Foley, DVM, MS, DACVIM grew up on a wheat farm in southeastern Kansas. Prior to attending veterinary school at Kansas State University she was a breeding manager and assistant trainer at a reining horse farm in New York. She completed her master's thesis on aerosol respiratory therapies and rhodoccal infections in foals during her Internal Medicine residency at Marion duPont Scott Equine Medical Center in Leesburg, Virginia. She has been practicing internal medicine in the North Texas area since 2014. She recently opened Equanimity Equine Internal Medicine where she provides routine and specialty medical care both in the field and at the clinic based out of Foals R Us in Whitesboro, Texas. Outside of the office she enjoys riding her paint gelding Smitty and competing in agility with her two dogs Auggie and Pirata. Foals The 2020 foaling season is upon us! I find that practitioners typically align themselves into one of two camps: loving to love foals or loving to hate them. Personally, I think foaling season is the most glorious time of the year fraught with challenges and rewards. I hope to provide a practical guide to medications in the neonatal foal that will help ease some of the challenges of the season especially when referral may not be an option. Foals are not Ponies Presenting my master's research during a campus-wide research day I found an unexpected question arise among the nonveterinary scientists. They didn't understand the difference between a mature pony and a foal. At the time, I couldn't comprehend someone not knowing the difference between the two and it became an inside joke within our resident group. However, in some ways I think equine practitioners deal with a similar question when treating foals. When does the maturing foal cease being a neonate and necessitate routine drug dosing? One of the difficulties treating equine neonates lies in their higher total body water that affects the volume of distribution of pharmaceuticals when compared to the mature equine. Neonatal foals are comprised of 20% more total body water, primarily housed in the extracellular fluid (Davis 2018). Pharmaceutical dose and intervals therefore must be adjusted to ensure adequate blood and tissue levels of drug to effectively treat the equine neonate. Typically, doses of lipophilic drugs remain unchanged whereas the doses of hydrophilic drugs must be increased (Corely and Hollis 2009). focus on

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