Tackling the Mystery of Breakdowns (cont'd) It was felt that the bones of horses should be governed by some of these same principles governing stress, overuse, and breakdown. The one characteristic that differentiates bone from steel or other structure materials, however, is the ability of bone to regenerate. If rested and not subjected to continual stress, bone can repair itself. This fact led researchers to look at the effect of exercise, both the speed of the work and amount of work, on catastrophic fractures. It was assumed that intense speed work should increase the risk of injury and researchers set out to see if this was in fact true. In this study, using information on 64 horses euthanized during a nine-month period in 1991, the researchers attempted to match each horse with a catastrophic racing fracture to a control horse selected from horses that were less severely injured during the same time period at the same track. Horses were evaluated for a number of factors, including age at first race, average lifetime racing frequency, percentage of time laid up, time since last layup, and the total and rate of work accumulated within one month and six months of the injury. Overall statistical analysis found that only high total and high average daily rates of exercise within a two-month period were associated with an increased risk of catastrophic racing fracture. Horses that had accumulated a total of 35 furlongs of high-speed activity in races or timed workouts within the two months had a 3.9 times greater chance of catastrophic racing fracture compared with matched horses that had accumulated 25 furlongs of similar work during the same period. Horses that had a daily average of 0.6 furlongs of such speed work daily were almost twice as likely to suffer a fatal fracture as were horses that worked an average of only 0.5 furlongs ...

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