This Wednesday, October 22, at 8:00 PM ET, Dr. Sarah White-Springer will be sharing the findings of her now-concluded research on the effects of inflammation and fatigue on the longevity and overall well-being of performance horses. As a follow-up to her presentation at the 2024 Adequan®/USDF Annual Convention, she will discuss how nutrition, exercise, sleep, and light exposure are related to recovery and injury prevention for our equine counterparts. Below, we asked Dr. White-Springer a few questions to provide a preview of her upcoming USDF Virtual Education Series.
Can’t make the session? No need to worry! USDF Virtual Education Series sessions are available for streaming in the USDF Education Library within 30 days following the scheduled session.
The USDF Virtual Education Series hosts education sessions with industry professionals over a variety of dressage and equine education topics. Members are eligible to sign up through the online submission form to receive the webinar link and access to the session. Each session is free to USDF members and is USDF University-accredited. Members will receive 0.25 education credits upon verification of attendance. The webinar will start automatically through the provided link on the designated date and time.
What can viewers expect to learn from your upcoming presentation?
1.) Dietary starch might not be the demon it’s been made out to be, and 2.) we might need to pay closer attention to artificial light exposure in our performance horses to ensure optimal welfare.
What was your favorite part of conducting this research?
When it was over! Equine research is fun, but it’s exhausting. The best part of any project is seeing the data come together so we can make informed recommendations on how to best feed and manage our horses.
What inspired you/Texas A&M University to conduct this specific research project? Where did the original objective come from?
All research I conduct is born of observations in the industry, combined with my background in nutrition and exercise physiology. My goal is always to improve welfare and optimize performance in equine athletes. My specialty is skeletal muscle, but I always try to keep in mind that no single system acts alone in the body. I make every effort to conduct slightly more holistic studies, so we can see an overall picture of how interventions impact the whole horse. There are two primary studies I will cover in this talk, both focusing on inflammatory responses to exercise. The first investigates the impacts of dietary starch at levels common in currently available commercial feeds, and the second explores the impacts of altered circadian rhythms.
How did you end up doing this kind of research? (You are welcome to give some insight into your dressage/horsey journey here or in a separate section!)
I was on my first horse at six months old. I started taking lessons when I was seven years old and have been an avid equestrian ever since. In college, I took an equine nutrition course (with an incredible professor), and it made me realize how little we truly knew about optimal nutrition in performance horses. Growing up, the way we fed horses was based on “this is how we’ve always done it.” But then I realized those weekly bran mashes were actually quite bad for a horse’s gastrointestinal tract. During my master’s degree, I had the opportunity to evaluate dietary selenium on muscle, and I fell in love with research, specifically skeletal muscle. I went on to add a minor in Applied Physiology and Kinesiology during my PhD and expanded my repertoire of techniques through postdoctoral training in muscle disease in humans, which also included using rodent models. Currently, my lab focuses on improving muscle health in disease and performance. We work with eight different species, spanning topics of muscle atrophy (such as aging and microgravity) to muscle growth for meat production in cattle and pigs, to – obviously – optimizing the health and welfare of performance horses.
What’s next for you in terms of research projects?
They never end! On the current docket are ongoing investigations into ways to predict fatigue susceptibility, in turn decreasing fatigue-induced injury in equine athletes. We’re also planning more dietary studies to ensure we are providing the best nutrition to performance horses. Excitedly, our newest equine faculty member at Texas A&M, Dr. Erica Macon, is an expert in endocrinology, so we’ve been working together to develop some projects using light exercise to decrease postprandial insulin responses in metabolic horses. I could probably write a short book about the list of upcoming projects, but I’m incredibly excited to keep pushing equine exercise research forward, and am eternally grateful for the many industry collaborators who have supported our work over the years.
