Born to run? Associations between gestational and early‐life exposures and later‐life performance outcomes in Thoroughbreds
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Gestational and early-life exposures may modulate development during growth and influence future athletic performance. OBJECTIVES: To investigate associations between gestational and early-life exposures in Thoroughbreds and (i) likelihood of racing, (ii) total number of runs and (iii) total prizemoney by the end of the 3-year-old year. STUDY DESIGN: Prospective cohort. METHODS: Daily records were kept on the location and duration of turnout, management and veterinary-attended episodes of disease or injury from birth until leaving the farm or study exit for 129 Thoroughbred foals on six stud farms. Dams' signalments, reproductive and gestational health records were collated concurrently. Available race performance records to the end of the fourth year of life were collected from industry databases. Mixed effects logistic and linear regression modelling, including farm, mare and stallion as random effects, were used to investigate associations between gestational and early-life exposures and race performance outcomes. RESULTS: Overall, 76% (98/129, 95% CI: 68-82) of horses raced, making a median of 7 starts (IQR 4-11, range 1-23) and earning a median of £6898 (IQR 1712-17,987; range 0-197,601) in prizemoney. Increasing average daily turnout time (hours) and turnout area (acres) in the first 6 months of life were associated with increased odds of racing and increased total prizemoney earned, respectively (OR 1.31, 95% CI: 1.09-1.58 p = 0.004 and β-coefficient = 0.32 (lnGBP), 95% CI: 0.03-0.61, p = 0.03). Age at weaning (days) was associated with increased odds of racing and an increased total number of runs (OR 1.03, 95% CI: 1.01-1.05 and β-coefficient = 0.09, 95% CI: 0.04-0.14, p < 0.05, respectively). MAIN LIMITATIONS: Absence of training-related data; low study power for some exposure variables. CONCLUSIONS: More extensive early-life turn out practices and later weaning enhanced later-life race performance outcomes. This could be due to increased opportunity for positive musculoskeletal tissue adaptation and optimal growth and development rates during a critical window of developmental plasticity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".