Abstract
The 2019 Havemeyer Workshop brought together researchers and clinicians to discuss the latest information on Equine Asthma and provide future research directions. Current clinical and molecular asthma phenotypes and endotypes in humans were discussed and compared to asthma phenotypes in horses. The role of infectious and non-infectious causes of equine asthma, genetic factors and proposed disease pathophysiology were reviewed. Diagnostic limitations were evident by the limited number of tests and biomarkers available to field practitioners. The participants emphasized the need for more accessible, standardized diagnostics that would help identify specific phenotypes and endotypes in order to create more targeted treatments or management strategies. One important outcome of the workshop was the creation of the Equine Asthma Group that will facilitate communication between veterinary practice and research communities through published and easily accessible guidelines and foster research collaboration.
Highlights
The effort to clarify the phenotype and terminology used to characterize horses with chronic inflammatory airway disease started in 2000 with a workshop in East Lansing, Michigan (1)
Costa et al reported increases in grass but not tree pollens were significantly associated with equine pasture asthma (EPA) exacerbation using a pollen station ∼90 miles from affected horses (25)
Mild-moderate equine asthma (EA) affects 68–77% of pleasure horses based on tracheal wash cytology and up to 80% of racehorses based on bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) cytology (44, 75)
Summary
The effort to clarify the phenotype and terminology used to characterize horses with chronic inflammatory airway disease started in 2000 with a workshop in East Lansing, Michigan (1). Strict management changes or medical therapy will results in rapid improvement in clinical signs if exposure to triggering factors is not addressed improvement will be short lived or incomplete (3, 15) This form of mild respiratory disease is mainly subclinical with horses showing non-specific signs such as intermittent coughing and poor performance (3). Despite occurrence of poor performance and subclinical viral activity in the Swedish Standardbred trotters, the authors were unable to detect associations between EHV-2/-5 and clinical respiratory disease and/or poor performance These conflicting results reflect the ongoing challenges in establishing causality between mild to moderate EA and gamma herpesviruses, known to be ubiquitous in both healthy and clinically affected horses. Outside of the experimental exposure setting, higher dust exposure has been associated with increased risk of tracheal mucus accumulation in racing Thoroughbreds (127)
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