3. EXERCISE INTOLERANCE

You probably don’t need researchers to tell you that the body’s athletic capabilities diminish with age. But striving to understand exactly how and why that happens may help improve a horse’s quality of life. “We have shown that aerobic capacity does decline with age,” says Karyn Malinowski, PhD, director of the Rutgers Equine Science Center at Rutgers University. “[We’ve] done many studies on the use of exercise and exercise training/conditioning, trying to ameliorate some of the negative effects of aging.”

One of the more significant agingrelated changes is hormonal in origin. “We have shown changes in the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis [HPAA] in that cortisol response post-exercise is lower in the old horse