Nephrosplenic Entrapment in Horses: A Systematic Review from a Meta-Analysis Approach.

Left dorsal displacement or the large colon, also called nephrosplenic entrapment, occurs commonly in horses. A lot of factors including anatomic characteristics, breed, age and gender, added to diet, take part in this disease. The aim of this study is to determinate the main predisposal factors that may contribute to the nephrosplenic entrapment using a statistical tool called metaanalysis. This study is based on the systematic and structured integration of the information obtained from different clinical studies, all of them focused on the nephrosplenic entrapment, in order to evaluate them as a whole and to be able to provide a synthetic and quantitative evaluation of the available studies. To achieve this statistical study we have relied on a series of scientific articles published from 1989 to 2010. We have grouped the different races found in the articles into two groups: warmblood (n=52) and hotblood (n=30). As for sex, were divided into females (n=22) and males, including both together stallions and geldings (n=60). Once performed the meta-analysis test, we can determine that males are more likely to present the nephrosplenic entrapment than mares, and also warm-blooded horses are more likely to have this pathology than hot-blooded horses. The advantage of performing the meta-analysis is that the sample size used is much higher than in any of the articles reviewed separately, so the results are much more reliable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]