Reply #3: How much blood? [View All]

[two gun sid]

From Thoroughbred Times:
IF RESEARCHERS are correct, buyers may have another tool to use when selecting a prospective racehorse.

In Standardbred studies in the late 1960s, Swedish researchers drew a correlation between the amount of blood coursing through a horse's body and its ability to excel as an athlete. The studies were based on the principle of oxygen transport: The greater the number of red blood cells, the better the horse could deliver oxygen to its tissues and the more efficiently it could clear away waste products that cause a horse to tire.

Dean Householder, Ph.D., a former associate professor of animal science at the University of Kentucky and the president of the consulting firm Thoroughmotion, was intrigued by the studies, so he began an investigation to see if their results in Standardbreds held true for Thoroughbreds.

"Dr. Sunne Persson did the work in Sweden," Householder said. "He was one of the pioneers in sports medicine in horses. They were correlating blood volume in Standardbreds with exercise-tolerance tests and found basically that horses that had greater blood volume tended to work a given distance in a quicker time compared with the horses that didn't.

http://www.thoroughbredtimes.com/horsehealth/hhview.asp?recno=67759&subsec=