CASE REPORT article
Front. Vet. Sci.
Sec. Anesthesiology and Animal Pain Management
This article is part of the Research TopicCardiac anaesthesia in veterinary medicine: recent advances and innovationView all 4 articles
Case Report: Inhaled salbutamol in the successful treatment of life-threatening acute hyperkalaemia in an anaesthetised horse
Provisionally accepted
- 1Southern Counties Veterinary Specialists, Ringwood, United Kingdom
- 2Ghent University. Department of Large Animal Surgery, Anaesthesia and Orthopaedics., Ghent, Belgium
- 3Ghent University. Equine Cardioteam Ghent, Department of Internal Medicine, Reproduction and Population Medicine., Ghent, Belgium
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Hyperkalaemia is an uncommon complication of general anaesthesia in healthy horses. This case report describes the occurrence of life-threatening acute hyperkalaemia in a 13-year-old, female French Trotter anaesthetised for experimental right and left atrial 3D electro-anatomical mapping. Intra-operative development of hyperkalaemia (7.55 mmol/L) (Ref. 3.00 – 4.00 mmol/L) with atrial standstill on ECG necessitated transvenous ventricular pacing whilst initial treatment with insulin and glucose was initiated. Plasma potassium levels continued to increase (8.00 mmol/L) prompting adjunctive treatment with 5 µg/kg of inhaled salbutamol and intravenous furosemide 0.93 mg/kg. Eight minutes after salbutamol administration, return of spontaneous atrial contraction was observed on echocardiography and plasma potassium concentration rapidly decreased on serial blood samples. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first case report documenting the use of inhaled salbutamol in the treatment of life-threatening acute hyperkalaemia in an anaesthetised horse.
Keywords: anaesthesia, Atrial standstill, beta 2-agonists, Cardiology, Equine
Received: 10 Jul 2025; Accepted: 04 Dec 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Rollet, Flyps, Vernemmen, van Loon and Schauvliege. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Madelyn Sophie Rollet
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