Rikke Buhl
Professor, PhD, DVM
The Equine Cardiac Group Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, University of Copenhagen
Biografi
Equine cardiology has been my main research area since graduation from Vet school in 1999. In 2004, I defended my PhD thesis within cardiology with focus on “Equine Athlete’s Heart”. I have continued the research within this area first as assistant professor and later as associate professor within Large Animal Internal Medicine. Lately I have been appointed as professor within equine cardiology.
My research area was for the first years concentrated within the area of “Athlete’s Heart”. I was the first to describe the development of heart size and prevalence of valvular regurgitation in trotters as a result of long standing physical exercise. The main results of these studies are that training induces significant cardiac hypertrophy with large individual variation among horses. Also a dramatic increase in the prevalence of valvular regurgitation was observed, and for some horses this lead to reduced racing performance.
