Tom Johnston Communications Services Oklahoma State University (405) 744-6260 3/26/2003
"Mushers" in this year's Iditarod sled dog race in Alaska, approach the #1 checkpoint on the 1,200 mile race. OSU veterinary faculty member Dr. Michael Davis was there and did health research on the dogs who raced.
You might say Dr. Michael Davis has a "cool" research job.
Davis, assistant professor of physiological sciences in OSU's College of Veterinary Medicine, has traveled to Alaska on an annual basis for several years now to examine the animal athletes in the yearly Iditarod sled dog race. Davis is interested in physical problems that have come to be associated with endurance sports, and he is seeking to define their inter-relationship.
"When it comes to endurance sports, everything from asthma to stomach ulcers to diarrhea is common not only in animals but humans as well. It hits humans especially hard in triathlons. What we are trying to do is pin down the causative factors," Davis explains.
It was a strange spring in Alaska, he added. "There was a total lack of snow in Anchorage, which is the usual southern starting point of the race. So the officials had to re-designate a course further north, starting in Fairbanks." He said rather than being the north-south route it usually is, it turned out to be east-west with part of the course doubled back on itself in order to make the total 1,200 miles for the race.
Davis says this year's efforts were aimed at setting up future study projects implementing a new non-invasive gastroenterological test developed by colleagues at Texas A&M. "We are hoping to validate this new test as a surrogate method, instead of having to anesthetize the dogs and scope them. It will be better for the dogs and for us."
A related study project is slated to begin in July. This project deals with exercise-induced asthma. "We're going to try to find out whether the abnormal conditions in the lung develop acutely in the context of a single race, or whether this is something that develops over time, as they train," he explains. Davis and his colleagues will start the study in July, when the dogs are completely rested. They will check them again in September and November and see if anything is changing during training. If changes are noticed, it would indicate that training is capable of causing the physical damage. If there are no changes, it would indicate the physical symptoms are just a race phenomenon.
"We would hope our research could, at some point, possibly lead us to new approaches to training as well as possible development of effective drugs for these physical problems," Davis concludes.
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