ULTRASONOGRAPHIC BIOMETRY AND RELATIONSHIP WITH GENDER, AGE AND WEIGHT IN HEALTHY DONKEYS

With the aim to establish a correlation between ocular measurements and individual factors, 110 healthy adult donkeys of different sizes and age were used giving a total of 220 eyes. On each donkey ocular ultrasonography was performed and the globe axial length (GAL), anterior chamber depth (ACd), vitreous depth (VCd), lens diameter (Ldi) and lens thickness (Lt) were measured. The differences between groups of animals, divided according to the gender, weight (<200 Kg and ≥200 Kg) and age (<10 years and ≥10 years) categories have been estimated. No gender differences have been found. After application of analysis of variance all measurements, with exception of Lt, were found to be correlated with the weight while only Lt had a statistical significance for differences between age categories. As in people a relationship between age and lens thickness has been established in the present work for donkeys. It appears that, as with the horse, the donkey lens grows throughout the life of the animal. These data could act as a pilot study to establish the growth pattern of the crystalline lens in the donkey and its relationship to the incidence of some important diseases.