Nutritional Management of Equine Inflammatory Bowel Disease: Integrating Diet with Medical Therapy

Equine inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) remains a clinical and nutritional challenge, largely due to its heterogeneous presentation, imperfect diagnostic tools, and variable response to therapy. Increasingly, equine IBD is better approached as a syndrome rather than a single disease entity, requiring a olistic, flexible, integrative clinical mindset.

This session explores how nutritional management can be strategically integrated with medical therapy in horses with suspected or confirmed IBD. After a concise overview of diagnostic limitations and complex case presentations, current nutritional practices in equine medicine will be critically reviewed and contextualized.

Practical, experience-based nutritional principles will be then presented, with differentiation according to major clinical phenotypes (e.g. weight loss, recurrent colic, or subclinical performance decline). The session concludes with a framework for formulating IBD based diets; emphasis will be placed on creating nutritional sound, adaptable rations that complement medical therapy and support intestinal function over the long term.