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\n Media contact:<\/strong> Brittany Steff, bsteff@purdue.edu<\/a> <\/p>\n <\/div>\n
Asthma afflicts nearly 1 in every 12 people in America, including 5 million children. It is one of the most common and costly human diseases in the U.S.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As it turns out, asthma in horses is much easier to study, leading to insights that may guide the way to therapies and treatments to help both humans and horses breathe easier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThere are so many similarities between asthma in humans and asthma in horses,\u201d Cou\u00ebtil said. \u201cChildren tend to have a type of asthma we call atopic asthma, which they tend to grow out of. We see that same kind of asthma in very young horses, but not in older horses. In older horses, and in humans, one of the biggest triggers for asthma is dust in the environment. And that\u2019s what we\u2019ve found over and over again \u2014 it\u2019s the dust. Managing that dust and medicating the symptoms are what we work on.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Cou\u00ebtil is a professor of large animal internal medicine in the College of Veterinary Medicine<\/a>, the director of the equine research program<\/a> and the director of the Donald J. McCrosky Equine Sports Medicine Center<\/a>. His research is part of Purdue\u2019s One Health initiative, a presidential initiative that involves research at the intersection of human, animal and plant health and well-being.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cou\u00ebtil, who grew up on a horse farm in Normandy, France, and colleagues formally identified equine asthma as a distinct condition in 2016<\/a>. Asthma is an inflammation of the airways: They fill with mucus and swell, making it difficult for the body to get the oxygen it needs to live.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Asthma is notoriously difficult to diagnose because it is so easy to confuse with other conditions. In humans, diagnosis often involves tests measuring lung capacity, known as \u201cpeak flow tests,\u201d which require the patient to take the deepest possible breath and blow the breath out for as long and as hard as possible to measure the amount their lungs can hold. Cou\u00ebtil also developed a \u201cpeak flow test\u201d for horses; however, it can only be done in his research laboratory and requires the horse to be sedated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But peak flow can vary due to a variety of conditions that have nothing to do with asthma: time of day, muscle condition, energy level, mood, stress, hormones, general well-being and whether the patient is currently in an asthma flare-up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the only surefire ways to assess asthma is to conduct a test called a bronchoalveolar lavage, or BAL, a procedure that doctors and veterinarians also call a liquid biopsy. The process involves putting a long, thin, hollow tool down through the patient\u2019s airways into their lungs and pumping saline through it, then sucking the liquid back up. The returned liquid includes cells from the lining of the lungs. When analyzed, those cells can tell veterinarians and doctors a great deal about the state of the pulmonary system \u2014 including whether the patient has asthma.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In humans and most other animals, this procedure can only be performed under deep sedation or general anesthesia. However, due to their unique anatomy, horses can undergo a BAL while they are awake and under only light sedation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The ability to conduct a BAL in field conditions gives veterinarians a diagnostic capacity that human doctors treating asthma lack. They can directly assess what conditions aggravate the lung cells and to what degree. Studies of asthma in humans must rely on larger sample sizes, much larger datasets and much greater variances in the data to get similar confidences in their results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While humans and horses do not share one-to-one correlations on what causes asthma, Cou\u00ebtil\u2019s research on horses illuminates sources of irritation as well as some preliminary possible treatments. The links could offer powerful insights into drivers of asthma in both horses and humans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the middle of an asthma flare, often called an asthma attack, the first course of action is rescue \u2014 opening the airways and calming the inflammation. For a human, that\u2019s usually accomplished with a handheld inhaler. Since horses lack thumbs, Cou\u00ebtil and his team use a nebulizer strapped to the horse\u2019s nose to deliver corticosteroids and bronchodilator medication \u2014 often the same medication used to treat a human asthma attack. Like a toddler or an infant who needs a nebulizer rather than an inhaler, horses need either a nebulizer or an adapter to use the same inhalers that humans with asthma use, since neither can consciously coordinate their breathing with the medication distribution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Calming the inflammation before it gets to the point of emergency is a priority. One promising substance Cou\u00ebtil and his team are investigating is fish oil rich in omega-3s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In a double-blind study conducted with the help of racehorse trainers in Indiana, California, New Mexico and Florida, Cou\u00ebtil\u2019s lab tested a fish oil supplement in nearly 100 horses\u2019 food to see if the omega-3 oils might help calm the inflammation in the lung cells in a way that helps ameliorate their asthma symptoms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Horses fed with fish oil had reduced lung inflammation within four weeks, while horses fed with a look-alike placebo oil \u2014 to fool horses and suspicious trainers alike \u2014 saw none.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Additional studies are needed to see if the link continues to holds true in humans, though research by other teams is encouraging<\/a>. But such a strong preliminary result is promising, exciting and enticing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe goal is better breathing,\u201d Cou\u00ebtil said. \u201cIf we can understand what\u2019s causing the inflammation, the driving causes, we can reduce it. And a lot of the same things work in humans as in horses.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Purdue University is a public research university leading with excellence at scale. Ranked among top 10 public universities in the United States, Purdue discovers, disseminates and deploys knowledge with a quality and at a scale second to none. More than 106,000 students study at Purdue across multiple campuses, locations and modalities, including more than 57,000 at our main campus locations in West Lafayette and Indianapolis. Committed to affordability and accessibility, Purdue\u2019s main campus has frozen tuition 14 years in a row. See how Purdue never stops in the persistent pursuit of the next giant leap \u2014 including its integrated, comprehensive Indianapolis urban expansion; the Mitch Daniels School of Business; Purdue Computes; and the One Health initiative \u2014 at https:\/\/www.purdue.edu\/president\/strategic-initiatives<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\nA gift horse<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Healthy as a horse<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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About Purdue University<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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