Trackside test to monitor equine lameness markers moves a step closer

Significant progress is being made on a simple blood test which could eventually give trainers and veterinarians another way to monitor racehorses for signs of bone stress and injury.

Australian veterinary technology company TeleMedVET is testing a rapid trackside blood test after research linked osteocalcin – a substance associated with bone formation and repair – with lameness and abnormal bone scans.

The test is not yet ready to diagnose an injury or predict which horses will be hurt. However, TeleMedVET’s next research phase will track horses through training and racing to examine how readings change with workload, bone adaptation and injury.

“Racing has always been an industry built around the health and performance of the horse, and there is an increasing expectation that we use every available scientific tool to do better,” TeleMedVET co-founder and director Chris Cowcher said.

“This research is about giving veterinarians and the industry another source of biological information to help understand the horse and make better-informed decisions about its health and welfare.”

The latest peer-reviewed study of 96 racehorses, published in Equine Veterinary Journal, found serum osteocalcin concentrations were higher in lame horses than in sound controls and varied with abnormalities detected by nuclear scintigraphy.

Its findings add imaging-based validation to a separate Racing Australia-backed field study of 1359 Thoroughbreds published last month.

The results do not establish osteocalcin as a diagnostic or predictive test with larger studies still required to determine whether repeated measurements can contribute to injury-risk assessment, monitoring or veterinary decisions.

“However, Australia’s racing regulators and its biggest training operations are watching keenly to see what may come out of the two studies.

TeleMedVET’s study, “Serum osteocalcin is associated with scintigraphic abnormalities in lame and clinically sound racehorses”, compared 48 lame horses sent for nuclear bone scans with 48 sound horses of similar age and sex from similar training environments.

The lame horses had an average osteocalcin level of 1.32 ng/mL, compared with 0.64 ng/mL in the sound group.

The work was funded by Racing and Wagering Western Australia (RWWA) through its Equine Welfare Research Fund, with collaborators at The University of Western Australia, Charles Sturt University, Perth Equine Hospital and Fulton Equine Consulting.

“The safety, health and welfare of racehorses is a key priority for RWWA and the broader WA racing industry,” RWWA head of animal welfare Dr Caroline McMullen said.

“Lameness is one of the leading causes of lost training and racing days, reduced performance and early retirement in racehorses.

“By identifying injuries earlier, trainers and veterinarians can implement appropriate management and treatment strategies that reduce injury risk and support horse welfare long term.”

Nuclear medicine specialists assessed the scans without knowing whether each horse was lame.

The EVJ paper is focused on the imaging arm of a programme that The Straight first reported in February 2025, when Racing Australia committed to a $400,000 study covering three states and more than 1200 horses in training.

The study’s results were published in *Animals* on August 12. It sampled 1359 fit-to-race thoroughbreds at metropolitan training centres, 493 in Western Australia, 481 in New South Wales and 385 in Victoria, and relied on trainer-reported soundness rather than imaging.

The two papers provide complementary evidence: the field study shows the osteocalcin signal in a large, unselected training population, while the EVJ study shows it aligns with objectively measured bone remodelling in a clinical setting.

Neither demonstrates that a single blood value can flag an individual horse before it breaks down.

TeleMedVET is now trialling a rapid blood test designed to measure osteocalcin at the track or stable rather than in a central laboratory.

The company’s stated aim is to make repeated sampling practical at scale, then run studies following horses through training and racing to see how osteocalcin moves with workload, skeletal adaptation and injury, and whether serial readings can identify horses that warrant closer veterinary assessment.

“Getting a reliable assay out of the laboratory and into a format that can be used around the horse is an important milestone,” Cowcher said.

“The technology will allow us to ask much bigger questions about how bone responds to training over time, and whether changes in a horse’s biology can give us useful information before an injury becomes clinically apparent.”

The ongoing research is expected to involve some of Australia’s largest stables.