Breathing Easier, Performing Better

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300 – July/August, 2026

By Megan Arszman

If you have experienced the tightening in your chest, the sounds of wheezing, and the struggle to get a full breath, you know the struggles of asthma. It may not show as outwardly as coughing, but you feel it–your body’s inability to take in oxygen, thus depleting your energy.

Asthma isn’t just a human condition. The struggles a human asthmatic can feel are the same ones a horse with asthma struggles with when breathing. In fact, just as low-grade asthma can be common in humans, it’s becoming more commonly found in horses. Most people just don’t know it’s a problem.

As part of Purdue University’s Equine Respiratory Disease Research Program, researchers have spent recent years focusing on inflammatory respiratory disease in horses. Laurent Couëtil, DVM, PhD, Dipl. ACVIM, a professor of large animal internal medicine and director of equine research programs at Purdue’s College of Veterinary Medicine in West Lafayette, Indiana, is leading the program to detect and treat airway inflammation. The overall goal of the program is to aid in the clinical management of respiratory disease in horses in hopes of advancing the use of horses as a model for respiratory disease in humans.

“What we have found is that racehorses commonly have low-grade airway inflammation, but it’s not being recognized because they don’t show a lot of overt signs,” says Dr. Couëtil. “They’re not coughing a lot, and trainers might think that the decreased performance is related to something else. But what we find is that they have low-grade inflammation, and that lowers their performance level compared to those who don’t have that problem.”

Tracking Breathing and Performance

Click here to read the complete article
300 – July/August, 2026