St. Louisans' generosity has altered the battle,
leading researcher says.

November 2005
By Joanie McKenna

Laminitis is the second leading cause of death in horses, behind colic.

And yet, owners who haven't dealt with the disease know little about it.

Laminitis is a catastrophic failure that happens in the equine foot, caused by some trigger factor. The crippling disease strikes indiscriminately, taking down such thoroughbred legends as Secretariat and Affirmed, and more recently, Sunday Silence.

Those who have been through the suffering watch for every new medical development, often pinning their hopes on the world's leading researcher in the field, Dr. Chris Pollitt of Australia.

Once an all-around practitioner, Pollitt has spent the last decade building a team of dedicated scientists at the University of Queensland. The group has been making significant progress in determining was causes laminitis, and St. Louis has played no small part in making that happen. Since 1995, Pollitt has been receiving grants twice a year from the Animal Health Foundation, a group started by St. Louis veterinarian Don Walsh and friends in 1984 to raise funds for animal research. Laminitis was supposed to be the first of many diseases to be cured, but it remains a thorn in the side of all. Pollitt calls himself lucky to receive the AHF funding and says that, without it, he'd be working at half the speed and producing half the volume.

Pollitt was in the United States this fall to speak at three big events:

• The Purina Mills Veterinary Equine Conference, attended by 400 veterinarians Oct 29-30 at the Purina Mills Conference Center in Gray Summit;
• The Third International Equine Conference on Laminitis and Diseases of the Foot, held Nov. 4-6 in West Palm Beach, Fla.;
• And an Animal Health Foundation fundraising dinner Nov. 19, again at the Purina Mills center.

Those who have attended the AHF fundraisers know Pollitt to be a tall, swashbuckling horseman who can tell a great story and can crack a mean stockwhip.

In private, he's a soft-spoken veterinarian who reviews his work with the passion of a scientist and the wisdom of someone who has seen a lot of suffering.

"I hate the disease. I hate it so much," he says, describing the helplessness of trying to treat a horse once it has fallen victim to laminitis.

During his visit to the area, Pollitt stayed at Walsh's log home in Pacific, and the two often stayed up all night reviewing cases and theories.

Interviewed there, both veterinarians say it's a long way from their first meeting in 1991, when they attended the same seminar, but neither remembers talking to the other.

Walsh was slowly building his research foundation but still looking for the right person to fund.

In 1995, the two again were at the same seminar held in Kentucky. Walsh listened to Pollitt speak about his work and thought he was the real deal. After a somewhat awkward introduction, they arranged a meeting the next morning, and over breakfast, Walsh asked Pollitt if he would be interested in a grant.

"I was embarrassed I could only offer him $14,000," Walsh says.

Pollitt laughs at the thought and says, to him, that was a windfall.

Walsh says he chose Pollitt because he thought his work was the most likely to succeed and Pollitt would continue to work on laminitis rather than move on to something else.

The small University of Queensland research team started out as Pollitt and one post graduate student. Now, Pollitt has three post doctorates and seven post graduates at the Australian Equine Laminitis Research Unit, which has attracted more than $2 million in funding.

"We have a critical mass and we get things done," Pollitt says.

St. Louisans to date have given the Animal Health Foundation more than $650,000. A large percentage of the money goes to Pollitt. Both veterinarians expected the disease to be cured by now.

Pollitt never intended to be a university academic in the first place. He comes from a family of tradesmen and was happy as a full-time veterinarian. Then he treated Twinkle, a 10-year-old Connemara who was overweight and had suffered a case of laminitis. He was sent to Pollitt by another vet who basically had given up.

"We had just heard about the heartbar shoe." Pollitt says. "We also did a hoof wall resection." With those new developments of the day, Pollitt brought the horse back to soundness.

Twinkle was feeling better, but the inquisitive scientist in Pollitt was becoming frustrated by the need to solve the mystery behind the disease.

"I wanted to try to understand it. Nothing I had read made sense," he says.

At the time, laminitis was thought to be caused by an interruption of blood flow to the foot.

What Pollitt has discovered is that it is a normal enzyme process out of control. The horse has the ability to separate the hoof from the tissue so the hoof wall can grow, similar to a fingernail growing. It's doing that under harmony in a controlled way. It's only by accident that a trigger factor comes along to activate the enzyme system in a way that causes the damaging separation between the inner hoof wall and the bone it's supporting inside the hoof.

He says he hasn't done his research to prove or disprove any theory. He's tried to develop an evidence-based philosophy to gain new knowledge. He admits he's had to change direction a few times over the years as he's been driven by new facts.

When asked if laminitis is on the rise, he says there are no hard numbers. But what he is sure of is that the world's horses are getting fatter.

"Obesity in horses is following obesity in people," he says. He credits that to the sedentary lifestyle of horses today coupled with lots of good nutritious food.

The disease is finally on the world radar, Pollitt says, citing a poll last year in which members of the American Association of Equine Practitioners said laminitis was the disease they would most like to see solved. Until then, laminitis hadn't rated that highly.

"It's the most frustrating disease to work with," Pollitt says. "Nothing we do helps."

When asked to compare the complexity of an equine foot to something on the human body, Pollitt says the horse foot and human hand are built on the same template. He described the horse's longest and now only finger as the pastern, with the horse standing on its fingernail in the form of a hoof wall. "It's the same evolutionary plan," he says.

Pollitt puts all of his information on an amazing Web site (www.laminitisresearch.org) accessible to all. Not only does he describe exactly how the equine foot works and then fails during the process of laminitis, but he illustrates it with his own photography as well as illustrations by some of the best artists in the medical illustration field.

"It's knowledge, not a forum, " Pollitt says.

Pollitt also, on invitation, has written chapters on laminitis in modern textbooks. His own textbook, "Colour Atlas of the Horse's Foot," has been reprinted four times and been published in German, Japanese and Spanish.

Researching laminitis has been nothing short of a roller coaster for the 63-year-old. While he was scheduled for mandatory retirement from the University of Queensland, he's appealing to the school to stay on. He has no intention of giving up the battle against laminitis.

Research is not a 9 to 5 job. Matter of fact, Pollitt and his researchers often work through the night."If you don't, you don't succeed," he says.

One of those successes is having proven over and over that icing a horse's feet at the earliest stages of laminitis stops the separation process from happening.

Some of the other highlights have included:

• Staining sections of a horse foot - to highlight the laminar interface of the foot - so well that Pollitt suddenly could visualize the mechanism of laminitis pathology.
• Using an electron microscope to show, at much greater magnification, the finest elements of the laminar interface. Seeing the basement membrane magnified at 60,000 times is witnessing "God's work," he says.
• Discovering that grass produces a unique sugar, fructan, not digestible in the small intestine, and that the fermentation of fructan starts the whole reaction that leads to laminitis.

The research job has required a tremendous amount of travel, and Pollitt has been to every continent, giving lectures from Japan to Norway to Latvia and Canada. He says he's proud to have taken the names of the University of Queensland and the Animal Health Foundation all over the world; he makes a point of acknowledging the foundation before each lecture.

But he's also tried to maintain a good family life and luckily is married to another understanding scientist. His wife, Sandra, is a biochemist.

Pollitt owns Australian stock horses, which he describes as a very smart working horse. He no longer competes in endurance but does still make time to ride. His daughter, Jane, is a dressage and combined training rider and just got back from a six-month training stint in Germany. Son Ben is working on the Banff ski slopes in Alberta, Canada.

Pollitt's goals remain the same as when he started this quest.

"I want to relieve enormous suffering by reducing its incidence," he says. Once laminitis has happened, it's very difficult to treat, and the best hope is prevention and early therapy before chronic damage sets in, he says.

Pollitt and Walsh were asked at separate times whether Secretariat and Affirmed could have been saved today if they had suffered from laminitis in 2005.

Both gave the same head-shaking, battle-weary reply.

"No."