A strangulating lipoma, by definition, is an acute onset illness. One minute they’re fine, the next minute the lipoma has wrapped around something important,cutting off blood flow. Cue typically severe colic signs that don’t stop until intervention or death.
To explain, lipomas are benign tumors. All that means is they grow in one place and don’t spread. A malignant tumor is a tumor that spreads. Maybe it’s in your pancreas today, but by Tuesday it’s in your liver and marching on. “Benign” is a term that makes us feel safe, but a benign tumor growing in the wrong place can still kill you. Enter the strangulating lipoma.
A lipoma can float in your belly for years, hanging by a pedicle or on some omentum, then one day, through a stroke of bad luck, it flips itself over/around an intestine and cuts off the blood supply. A blood starved gut is a painful, angry gut. It will quickly tell the brain things are pear-shaped and Dobbins goes from munching hay to rolling, trying to fix it. The trouble is, if it’s wrapped well enough to cut off the blood supply, it’s almost 99% certain Dobbins can’t roll it free.
Vague, on-and-off colic signs are not strangulating lipomas. It may still be a lipoma or other mass that intermittently rolls in the way, squeezes the gut, interferes with blood flow or actually grows inside and irritates or occludes the intestine, but strangulation results in death of the gut followed by death of the horse. A really hardy horse will live a couple days as it’s strangulated gut leads to septicemia and a slow death. Most go much faster, due in large part to us stepping in and helping.
If you’re talking years, think enteroliths, IBD, recurrent sand, really poorly placed mass or old scar tissue from things like intususceptions as foals, heck, even epiploic foramen entrapment can be something lucky horses repeatedly fix on their own, until they don’t. STRANGULATING lipomas are acute and fast. If your horse is sick for years, then dies of a strangulating lipoma, it’s most likely the lipoma beat the other illness to the punch line. It’s also possible that horse had a hyper- or hypo-motile gut related to the other issue and those changes made it easier for a lipoma to wrap and strangle the gut.
tl;dr - Strangulating lipomas are acute by nature. A chronic colic horse may die of a strangulating lipoma but the two likely aren’t linked unless that lipoma was doing something other than strangulating.
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Maybe too much info for your case, but I figure at some point someone in the future might have a similar issue. Colics aren’t exactly uncommon.
