Pigs on the fast track

October 5, 1995
Web posted at: 8:50 p.m. EDT

From Technology Correspondent Lori Waffenschmidt

COLUMBIA, Missouri (CNN) -- A day in the life of a pig: eat, sleep, and eat some more. Nobody would mistake the porcine creatures for animal athletes. "They're perfectly happy to lay around all day and only eat when they're fed, so they will be couch potatoes, naturally," explained veterinary biomedical Science professor Harold Laughlin. "Most other animals are smart enough to stay active."

Now scientists are making sure some pigs do stay active, by using them in an experiment comparing pigs to people in an effort to learn more about the effects of exercise. "We're running pigs on treadmills to try to determine what are the beneficial effects of exercise training," said Leona Rubin of the University of Missouri-Columbia. "We know that exercise training is supposed to improve coronary artery function and help to prevent disease, and we're hoping that we can figure out some of the mechanisms in the coronary blood vessels themselves that are responsible for this training effect."

Laughlin said one reason pigs are used in the research is because the anatomy of their coronary arteries is very similar to humans. When people or pigs get a plug in the coronary artery, they can actually form collateral, secondary blood vessels to bypass the plug. Researchers can produce these collateral vessels in pigs by implanting a small device. The blood channel narrows just as it does in certain forms of heart disease. But it happens safely in the pigs.

"This occluder is neat in that it takes several weeks to shut down and stop blood flow through that artery," said Janet Parker, another university researcher. "The heart has time to grow new blood vessels." But these new vessels, these collateral channels, are never as good as the real thing. "We hope that exercise training will improve or reverse the deficiencies in these blood vessels," Parker said.

So the pigs become guinea pigs, so to speak. Hogs that jog, as it were. See this 527K QuickTime movie to watch their workout. They'll run for about an hour at four to six miles per hour to determine what exercise training does to the coronary blood vessels. While the pigs might look funny, the research is serious business. "Coronary heart disease is still the number one killer of people in this country and most of the Western societies," Laughlin said.

Researchers say they have fun with the project because their subjects are natural "hams." "We have considered the idea of putting little booties on them. You know, they have very delicate feet and they're not accustomed to running on a treadmill," Rubin said.

For those who think the pigs don't like to run, the researchers say, "Hogwash!" They claim that after the pigs run and eat, they're very happy.

Pigs on the fast track

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