User talk:570ADM/sandbox

Information on incidence of EIPH for untreated horses as a result of racing would be useful for providing a risk/benefit perspective. 570jdw (talk) 17:51, 8 November 2013 (UTC)

Overall the material is very well organized and clearly communicated. I just had a few questions as I read that I thought might help add to the article. • How long has Furosemide been used for the prevention of EIPH? • Are owners required to disclose whether or not they treat horses with furosemide? • It sounds like little research has been conducted to verify the effectiveness of furosemside. Has any effort been made to look back since Furosemide has been used and compare instances of EIPH in those treated vs those non-treated to see if there is any correlation with a decrease in instances of EIPH in the treated horses. • Have there been any long term studies conducted to determine if there are any chronic side effects resulting from continued treatment with furosemides, maybe issues with bone density resulting from calcium depletion? 570ps (talk) 19:06, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

I will try to find data on incidence of EIPH for untreated horses. Hopefully something will come out from the Breeders' Cup very soon with how many juveniles had EIPH symptoms and how many didn't since they were supposed to be monitoring that this year and those races were two weeks ago now. I'll try to find some other data though, I haven't come across any since nearly all horses run on Lasix in the US (and there's a lot of anecdotal numbers, I read an article not long ago that an older veterinarian said 90% of the horses he'd seen had had EIPH symptoms at some point in their life). I'll try to find some international studies which might give some good balance on horses racing without Lasix. Yes, owners are required to report treatment. It has to be documented for betting public and it goes in the past performance and info in the race programs. That I actually forgot to include, so I'll add that. I'll look for some info on how long Furosemide's been in use (or known to be used, people like to keep working practices secretive). That wasn't something I'd actually thought to include, but would be useful. Very little research in Thoroughbreds has been done. I can look at some journals, see if there's info with other breeds. EIPH isn't just effecting racehorses, there may be some studies done with chronic bleeders of other breeds. I saw some articles on ponies/crossbreds, but skipped over them to focus on finding specifically what I was looking for. As far as I know there haven't been any long-term studies or retrospective inquiries done. This is actually a really recent issue, it came into public perspective in about 2008 (along with anabolic uses) and has really blown up within the last couple years. Furosemide and Bute usage are really being questioned by the public and a lot of breed entities in regards to the seeming rise (or at least increasing knowledge) of catastrophic breakdowns. And bone density/calcium loss is one thing that's questioned. The KER study of 7 horses is the only one I know of and I follow this topic very closely. I'll see if I can find anything else, probably look at foreign research. I'll check some non-profit sites and see if they're funding anything in progress. 570ADM (talk) 00:02, 12 November 2013 (UTC)

EDITS/Recommendations

"Much as in human sports, it takes a lot of maintenance and health care for racehorses to remain competitive" It takes a lot of maintenance in human sports? Not always, but the point is understood, consider rewording. "...diuretic that inhibits the absorption of sodium in the kidneys with..." Consider elaborating on this. Why is sodium absorption in the kidneys bad? "From October 27, 2013 cards, The Blood-Horse..." --not sure what this is, if it is a typo... Is there any data on the amount of horses that get EIPH on average on a yearly basis? When did trainers first start to give this injection or realize that this was an important disease to monitor? Is taking Furosemide at all considered dangerous for horses (aside from the one study with a 40 lb reduction), can it be fatal at higher doses?

I won't repeat any of the comments from above, but it appears that this is very well done and thorough. You seemed to have put a lot of work, and explained a good amount of current events, race history, and the research involved with this disease and drug. Perhaps the backlash in this particular drug is because of the overall perception of horse doping, since there have been many issues with performance enhancing drugs and numerous violations from trainers, therefore there is the idea to ban all the drugs, including Furosemide? http://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/23/horse-doping-scandal-rocks-dubais-rulers/?_r=0  Like this for instance.

Also, good job with having the picture of the chemical compound, and the basic chemical information about it. Be sure to include as many hyperlinks as possible. Mark Rosmann570MAR (talk) 03:19, 20 November 2013 (UTC)570MAR (talk) 05:18, 12 November 2013 (UTC)

I specifically meant professional human sports, which many athletes use a lot of techniques to keep their bodies working (ice baths, accupuncture, etc) similar to what some horses do (there are aquatreds, cold/salt water baths, even vibrating floors to increase bone density; a lot of human equivalents like massage, chiropractic, accupressure/puncture, etc). Even people who do 5ks for fun may have to take Ibuprofen for stiffness, which in horses phenylbutazone is the equivalent (which I didn't touch on much). The NY Times article you referenced has to do with a trainer in the UK for the Dubai ruling family bringing anabolics with him and using them on horses, when the UK does out-of-competition testing. He was slapped with an 8 year ban by the British Racing Authority. I didn't read this article, but the NYT many times sensationalizes articles with racing, so be warned. I've read several that are way off-base and make racing seem like it was 100 years ago, dirty and sleezy. They're blogs for a reason. 570ADM (talk) 18:54, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

Very nice and well presented. I think the sentence Not much in the way of long-term side effects of furosemide has been tested or researched. Would be better worded The long-termed side effects of furosemide use in race horses has not been well researched. A few questions in my mind you don't answer are Do horses die of EIPH or is this just a performance enhancing issue? It seems the use of furosemide is just to improve the performance. Have any horsed died due to use of furosemide? You give some pluses and minuses and an alternative but I am missing the risk assessment tie in a bit. Should horses with EIPH or likely to exhibit EIPH be bred and raced? Also you might want to add the Furosemide page and the EIPH page to a see also section at the end of your article. 570lah (talk) 19:36, 17 November 2013 (UTC)

I like the chemical data on the page!! I’m sure it will be very helpful to someone reading this article. As others have commented this article is very well organized and easy to also consider changing the wording in some areas as 570lah stated. Besides the comments already made I didn't see anything that appears to need attention at this time I will probably come back and read it again later. Good work!!570SJR (talk) 22:08, 17 November 2013 (UTC)

Good Job, I think that you need to add some information about the use of furosemide in animals that later will be destinated as food. I wrote the following paragraph with information regarding the concerns of the use of this substance in horse meat.570fmf (talk) 00:28, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

Withdrawal time in horse meat
A withdraw period for Furosemide in horse meat was not set yet by the Codex Alimentarius. The Codex’s ALINORM 01/31 from July 2000 proposed the evaluation by the Committee on Residues of Veterinary Drugs in Foods of this drug. The European Agency for the Evaluation of Medicinal Products in his summary report set the ADI to 2.5 µg/kg bw (maximum of 150µg per person) and decided that was not required to set a MLR for this substance. In USA, the FDA limited its use on horses intended for food or for human consumption .570fmf (talk) 00:28, 18 November 2013 (UTC)


 * Edits made as of 11/18: Clarified some wording. Added some info about sudden death due to EIPH, how long furosemide's been used for EIPH treatment, when epistaxis was first documented. Will be adding additional information on prevalence of EIPH in horses in jurisdictions that don't allow furosemide (Australia and Japan); both of which have imported American pedigrees over the years, so should be fairly reliable/applicable information. Haven't found any information on whether furosemide's been fatal at any given doses; it's been in use for about 40 years and the standards now are strict on post-race levels and withdrawal time is pretty well understood, so I'm not sure whether I'll find much on that. Thanks for your comments! 570ADM (talk) 18:54, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

Good background for risk-benefit
Very comprehensive and well-written. This is ready to post. don't be surprised if Wiki editors seek to reduce the length of the contribution since it is much longer than most Wikis. It will be interesting to follow the editing history of this Wiki as it is published. Very nice job!570jdw (talk) 13:57, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

Great article. I also thought the addition of horse meat information would be useful. That being said, the article is plenty long already. Some of it could be more concise to better fit Wikipedia standards. I like the tables and adequate use of links. Langleym (talk) 15:39, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

This is article has got all possible content that I could think of and also well constructed and presented. Great job ! 570mac (talk) 17:33, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

Yafei Wang

Your topic is intriguing because the use of this medicine is to increase the competence of horse in racing, this is more related to veterinary. But similar cases can be associated with humans when considering about drugs. You've listed all the owners that pledged not to use this medicine, I have a question: how would they control and limit the use of this chemical(any penalties), do they have any inspection measures and regulation which are conducted annually or stochastically to these horse owners?570wyf (talk) 08:58, 24 November 2013 (UTC)

Jie Luo--

Thanks for the detailed article! I wasn't aware doping racehorses was even possible. definitely a controversy. something that changes the weight of the horse by as much as 4% in just a few hours to a day has got to have more studies done with it. I have couple questions. how do they determine the dose to give to horses? you said that the "suggested threshold (in post-race testing) of furosemide is 100 nanograms (ng) per milliliter (ml) of blood plasma or serum," is that how they determine dose? not by mg/kg body weight pre-race?

you said that furosemide decreases sodium absorption in the kidneys, leads to lower arterial pressure, I assume it works just the same way in other animal species such as mice. have you come across any small animal study testing the toxicity (ADME, LOAEL, NOAEL) of furosemide? such as mice?

173.22.34.97 (talk) 21:50, 24 November 2013 (UTC)

Salix currently isn't considered as doping in the US, it's considered preventive treatment for EIPH (though the prevalence of how many horses actually bleed varies from ~50%-100%; very few legitimate numbers have been published on the number of horses that do bleed, most is anecdotal). The "enhancing" or "doping" qualities of it aren't exactly known, it could be the weight loss, it could be because it's preventing EIPH or another unknown factor that hasn't been found yet. There are lots of other illegal (and very, very bad) drugs that people have given (and been caught) to horses in recent years ("frog juice" snake venom, clenbuterol, "Purple Pain", etc, all of which are very bad and punishable, and especially stringent under the reform rules that have been proposed). All the information on dosage I could find was that a horse is injected with between 150mg-500mg in solution four or more hours pre-race. It has to be administered by a veterinarian. I'm guessing that it's up to the veterinarian to determine the specific dose based on how the animal metabolizes it. I read a study on how likely it is a horse will be over the 100ng threshold at certain times post-injection with specified amounts given. It has been used so prolifically over the past almost 40 years that it would be hard to track down how individuals decided on the dose. My guess is it has a lot to do with age, size and sex of the horse, distance of the race and if they've ever gone over the 100ng threshold before (slower metabolizers) or if they're a bad bleeder (higher dose). I did find an MSDS of furosemide tablets, and orally, most LD 50 for small mammals were >1000mg/kg BW (http://www.pfizer.com/files/products/material_safety_data/PZ00887.pdf page 6)...since this is given at no more than 500mg (in a 1000lb/~450kg animal), it doesn't seem dangerous. Furosemide works similarly in other mammals. I actually didn't think about looking at other species studies. There is also a lot of controversy on what exactly causes EIPH. Could it be a spike in blood pressure due to the spleen dumping RBC into the blood stream (I think this seems most logical, but excluded my opinion best I could)? Could it be the guts moving during full-gallop and colliding with diaphragm which in turn causes some capillaries to burst because of irregular breathing (has been suggested)? Could we have incidentally bred this into them along with speed genes (seems unlikely to me, an Australian study just found better performance of North American lines over half-NA, half-Aussie breds or full Australian lines, and they don't race on furosemide there, so since EIPH impedes performance, that shouldn't have been the conclusion)? I'm anti-Lasix simply because we don't know enough about the long-term side effects. It obviously works for EIPH and other issues like COPD, so it's not that it doesn't work how it's labeled. We've gotten technology to get past it masking other drugs, so my problem doesn't lie with that either. But there are other things on the market to help with EIPH, along with "old school" management like pulling feed/water (physically slowly, not quickly chemically dehydrate them to reduce blood pressure), and it's been shown it has a strong genetic link, so it's possible to manage it, but more studies definitely have to be done in regards to long-term problems (especially a possible Calcium deficiency link). And there can be negative side effects and bad reactions to it. I chose this subject with a focus on the risk to the horse and rider on both sides of EIPH and the unknown side effects (potential) of furosemide; but it's also important to note the risk to racing's image. It's not like this is an elicit drug, but yet it's allowed in very few major racing jurisdictions in the world, and when Congress and federal regulation is an immediate concern (there was a Congressional hearing late last week), something needs to be addressed and discussed on both sides of the Lasix debate unless they want to be micromanaged by persons who don't necessarily care about the animal or industry and have no passion for it. 570ADM (talk) 23:59, 24 November 2013 (UTC) --

1 Furosemide Use in Horse Racing In the second paragraph of the introduction, can you provide proof that it is the most common way to prevent or reduce the severity of EIPH? If you currently have research that supports this point, I would recommend providing it after this statement. If you do not currently have research that supports this claim I would either (a) try to find statistics or research to support the point, otherwise (b) I would suggest rewording this statement.

Within the "Side Effects of Furosemide" section, I would recommend removing the "2yo" abbreviation used in the final paragraph of the section. Also, when you begin to discuss effectiveness of this type of drug, specifically when you use EIPH grades as a mean of assessing drug effectiveness, I would think it would be beneficial to briefly explain the EIPH grading system.

In the section "2012 owners" The first sentence has a typo. "Starting in 2012, the Thoroughbred Owners and Breeders Association gave an option owners of 2-year-olds to sign a pledge that they would race their juveniles without race-day medications (furosemide and phenylbutazone)." [add "to" between "option" and "owners"]

Overall, very good page though. Thoroughly explained topic.

570mpt (talk) 21:35, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

James Miller

Great job, very detailed and well presented.!!

Edits/comments: 1) I would consider placing Medication Reform before the Breeders Cup section. Just seems to flow better for me. 2) I would shorten the paper or link to the owners information. It's interesting and puts the skin on bones, but gets lost due to the length.

Nice Job!! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Go4dodgers (talk • contribs) 22:52, 2 December 2013 (UTC)