On the morning of October 31, 2023, the American thoroughbred racehorse Practical Move completed a routine gallop, only to collapse and die moments later. The subsequent necropsy—essentially the animal version of a human autopsy—pointed to sudden cardiac death as the likely cause. In the high-stakes world of elite competition, such tragedies are mercifully rare but always shocking, whether the victim is a prized racehorse or a celebrated human athlete.
More than a decade earlier, on March 17, 2012, British footballer Fabrice Muamba collapsed during a televised FA Cup match, 41 minutes into play. His heart had stopped due to sudden cardiac arrest. For an agonizing 78 minutes, Muamba was clinically dead. Only after 15 defibrillatory shocks was he revived, and he later received an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator—a device designed to monitor heart rhythms and deliver life-saving shocks when dangerous arrhythmias strike. His story, alongside Christian Eriksen’s collapse during Euro 2020, captured global attention. Yet, for every headline-grabbing incident, there are countless others—human and animal alike—that unfold away from the glare of cameras, leaving families, handlers, and entire communities searching for answers.
According to The Conversation, horses suffer many of the same heart conditions as humans, including arrhythmias and sudden cardiac arrest. Like elite athletes, they push their cardiovascular systems to the brink. Their extraordinary physiology makes them a unique and, until recently, underused model for studying how the heart functions—and sometimes fails—under extreme physical strain. This shared vulnerability has prompted researchers and clinicians to question the old boundaries between human and animal medicine.
Enter the One Health, One Medicine agenda—a philosophy that recognizes the deep interconnections among human, animal, and environmental health. As outlined by The Conversation, this approach calls for collaboration among doctors, veterinarians, scientists, policymakers, and environmental experts to tackle shared challenges. While One Health is often associated with infectious threats like avian flu or COVID-19, its relevance extends far beyond pandemics. Non-communicable diseases—those that can’t be passed from person to person—are now the leading cause of death and disability worldwide, and they affect both people and animals.
At its heart, One Health is built on a simple but profound idea: humans and animals share the same biological systems. Studying one helps us better understand the other. And when it comes to cardiovascular health, racehorses offer a compelling case for why this matters. Horses’ heart anatomy and disease patterns closely mirror those of humans. Their ability to shift from resting heart rates as low as 20 beats per minute to over 200 during exertion provides a natural model of extreme cardiac adaptability—something that’s simply impossible to replicate in most laboratory animals.
Kamalan Jeevaratnam, Head of the School of Veterinary Medicine and Professor in Clinical Physiology at the University of Surrey, has seen firsthand the devastation caused when a horse collapses during or after a race. As a cardiac electrophysiologist, he specializes in the heart’s electrical activity, both in humans and animals. "Exercise-associated sudden death is notoriously hard to predict and devastating when it strikes—not only for the horses and their handlers, but for the racing world more broadly," Jeevaratnam notes (The Conversation).
Alongside his research team, Jeevaratnam is working to identify subtle electrical abnormalities in equine hearts that could serve as early warning signs. The ultimate goal? To understand what causes these sudden cardiac events and, crucially, to predict which horses are most at risk. This research isn’t just about saving horses. What scientists learn from equine hearts could help transform human cardiac medicine—particularly for athletes and others exposed to intense cardiovascular stress. If rhythm disturbances can be recognized, managed, and prevented in high-performing horses, new strategies may emerge to prevent sudden cardiac arrest in people.
But the benefits of equine research go far beyond the heart. Studies of horse physiology are also yielding valuable insights into gut health, immune response, and metabolism. As prey animals—species that have evolved to survive being hunted—horses are finely attuned to their environment. Their survival has long depended on their ability to detect and react quickly to potential threats, resulting in a highly sensitive nervous system. This heightened reactivity extends to their gastrointestinal tract, making them especially vulnerable to stress-related gut issues.
Environmental changes, emotional distress, and social disruption can all trigger digestive problems in horses, including colic and gastric ulcers. Because of this sensitivity, horses have emerged as valuable models for studying the gut-brain axis—the complex communication network between the digestive system and the brain. They also offer insight into how chronic stress and inflammation can affect long-term health, with potential applications not only in veterinary care but also in understanding human conditions such as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), anxiety, and depression.
As The Conversation highlights, investing in equine health is not just about animal welfare. It’s about expanding the possibilities for human medicine, too. Cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and even some cancers are not just human problems; they’re shaped by shared genetic, environmental, and behavioral forces that cut across species. By breaking down the silos between human and animal health, the One Health approach allows for the sharing of knowledge, the pooling of data, and the development of cross-species innovations that benefit everyone.
Too often, animal health is treated as separate—or even secondary—to human health. That’s a mistake, argue proponents of One Health. Our well-being is tightly bound to the health of the animals we care for and the environments we share. A renewed focus on equine well-being doesn’t just improve outcomes for horses. It sharpens our understanding of physiology, strengthens public health, and helps prevent avoidable deaths—on and off the track.
If we want to reduce the risk of sudden cardiac death in athletes—or anyone pushing their body to its limits—we need to widen the lens. That means recognizing the value of research in veterinary medicine. It means, as Jeevaratnam puts it, "turning the stethoscope toward the stable." Because when a horse collapses on the track, it’s more than a tragedy. It’s a missed opportunity—to understand, to prevent, and to save.
The lesson is clear: by investing in equine research and embracing a One Health perspective, we stand to gain critical insights that can improve the health and safety of both animals and humans. The next breakthrough in cardiac medicine—or in the treatment of stress-related disorders—might just start in the stable, not the lab.
