Hay Folks,
 |
| Ryan aboard the great Lord Nelson! |
After five long, hard years working
at the lab bench and out in the Treadmill Barn with my gal pals at Rutgers,
Ryan Avenatti has finally earned his Ph.D.!
Now, he will be Dr. Avenatti!
I was going to give him doughnuts
as a graduation gift, but…unfortunately, I ate them… So, I’m writing a blog all
about him and his research to make up for my insatiable sweet tooth. This Monday, he presented his research
entitled, “Effects of age and acute
exercise on mediators of inflammation and energy homeostasis in horses”. All those fancy words, pretty much mean, how a
horse’s exercise physiology changes with age.
First, he wanted to determine how
well older horses mobilize their energy supply during exercise by measuring
lactate and cortisol. Lactate is
produced during exercise and helps give the muscles more energy to continue
working. In the older horses, the
lactate concentration did not go as high and quickly diminished compared to the
young horses. Cortisol is produced by
the adrenal gland following exercise, and works by telling the liver to produce
more glucose for working muscles to use. Cortisol in older horses diminished
faster following exercise than in the younger horses. The older horses couldn't perform as well as the young horses, probably
because their muscles were running out of fuel!
Second, as horses age, more
inflammatory cytokines (a type of protein) are produced which can lead to
decreased insulin sensitivity. Dr.
Avenatti looked for changes in cytokines following exercise, including IL-1β,
which helps repair tissue. These barely increased as compared to the young
horses!
This means that an older horse is sore for a lot longer than a younger
one, which can easily heal the damaged muscles.
He also looked at heat shock
proteins (HSPs), which are chaperones or “proteins” that help assemble other
proteins. Kind of like parents helping their children get dressed in the
morning. During exercise, some of these
other proteins fall apart like a child’s jeans getting ripped from playing and
the HSPs sew them back together. In
older horses, this process doesn’t happen as effectively following exercise. However,
Dr. Avenatti determined that HSP expression would be a great biomarker of a
training program’s effectiveness, especially in older horses.
Part of the third objective of
his work was to determine the influence exercise on circulating insulin and
glucose. All the horses used in his
study were healthy and did not have any metabolic syndromes, like the one I
blogged about last October. You can read
more about Equine Metabolic Syndrome here.
He determined that age alone didn’t change insulin sensitivity but it did alter
the timing of insulin production in response to exercise. Insulin was high in older horses earlier than
in the young horses, but glucose was higher in the young horses following
exercise than the aged horses. Since
insulin tells cells to take up and store glucose, Dr. Avenatti’s findings give
us a clue that older horses cannot restore their energy reserves as well as
young horses following exercise.
After explaining ALL of that, now
I know why it took Ryan five years to accomplish his research goals. His contribution will advance equine health
by helping aging horses, like me, as well as my two-legged pals, live a long
and healthy life. Everyone at the Equine Science Center, including myself,
wishes him the utmost luck and success for his future (even, though he called
me old in his presentation!) To read
more about his research, check out our 2012
Stakeholder Report on page 8 and the 2013
Stakeholder Report on page 13.
And congratulations to all of the
2014 RU graduates!
Lord Nelson
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