Man’s best friend may turn out to be an athlete’s best friend as well. By studying the effect of dietary supplements on Iditarod sled dogs, Ohio State graduate students may be discovering ways to increase the performance of high endurance athletes.In a recent study sponsored by the IAMS pet food company, Carole Baskin, a doctor of veterinary medicine and graduate research associate in veterinary clinical sciences, gave vitamin supplements to sled dogs to see if immunosuppression and oxidative stress would be decreased in the dogs.Immunosuppression and oxidative stress often occur in high endurance athletes, like marathon runners, after a big race. This type of stress has been found to make many athletes more susceptible to viral infections or harmful bacteria the first couple of days after a big race.Baskin said some vitamin supplements act as anti-oxidants, decreasing the danger of these harmful effects on the immune system after high-endurance exercise.Since Iditarod sled dogs must pull a sleigh and mush some 1,150 miles between Anchorage and Nome, Alaska, each year, they make perfect test athletes for Baskin’s research.Baskin said that dogs are much better research subjects than humans because it’s much easier to control outside variables that might bias the experiment. “The dogs eat the same, they’re the same age, they’re housed together, they’re genetically related and they’re at the same fitness level,” Baskin said. Baskin traveled to Chena Hot Springs, Alaska, this past winter to test the effects of a vitamin E, beta carotene supplement on 62 sled dogs owned by five-time Iditarod champion, Rick Swensen.The study was designed to measure the effects of vitamin supplements or anti-oxidants on immunofunction in sled dogs after extended endurance training.”Supplementation had little effect on the immunofunction after exercise, but seemed to decrease exercise induced oxidative stress,” Baskin said. Baskin said she got a lot of help from other scientists involved in the study. Among them were representatives of IAMS and Kenneth W. Hinchcliff, a Ph.D. and associate professor of veterinary clinical sciences at Washington State University.Swensen seemed pleased with the results of the supplements on his dogs.”We continued to give the supplements for the duration of the racing season, basically April 1,” Swensen said. “I was very happy with the performance of my team this year and I suspect that the nutritional supplements were a positive factor in their performance.” Although Baskin’s research study can not be directly linked to humans, it does provide a solid basis for similar studies to be performed on groups of human athletes.Robert A. Disilvestro, Ph.D. and associate professor of Human Nutrition and Food Management at OSU, thinks that the study on sled dogs will provide the basis for future studies on human athletes.”There has been sort of a series of studies done on sled dogs,” Disilvestro said. “It’s kind of a progressive project.”He said that the research done on sled dogs will help other scientists determine how to conduct similar studies on humans in the future.”With human athletes you tend to be more limited in scope in what you can measure,” Disilvestro said. “The main question comes from the stand point of muscle fatigue and muscle stress. Anti-oxidants may prove to make the immune system in humans less vulnerable in post exercise.”