Many hard working hunt, dressage, and three-day event horses can be highly competitive in their late teens and early twenties. Injuries, however, are a fact of life for both people and horses. This is particularly true for those involved in competitive sports. Often these injuries occur early in life and are career-limiting. Now, with specialized mosaic arthroplasty techniques, the rehabilitation of many competitive horses with previously untreatable joint injuries is possible.
Joint injuries are a major cause of economic loss in the horse industry.
Even a small cartilage injury in a critical spot can end a successful career. Cartilage in these high motion joints does not heal in adult horses. Another approach to joint injury is to resurface the site with a graft. Synthetic materials and crude cartilage grafts have been tried, but both types were easily damaged and had problems with attachment to the underlying bone. In human orthopedics, grafting is relatively successful in difficult cases where a tumor or injury has destroyed all or part of a joint.