A 100-Year Review: Metabolic health indicators and management of dairy cattle

Abstract

Our aim in this Journal of Dairy Science centennial review is to describe the evolution of focus on metabolic indicators, from discovery and description to evaluation at the individual cow and subsequently herd levels, over the past 100 yr. Furthermore, we discuss current and future technologies that will be used in the dairy industry to utilize these indicators widely going forward. Knowledge of chemical changes in various fluids (e.g., blood, urine, and milk) accompanying numerous metabolic disease states in the dairy cow has existed since almost the beginning of the Journal of Dairy Science 100 yr ago. However, only during the last 25 yr have these metabolic indicators been developed into useful tools for cow- and herd-level monitoring for disease and management. From the 1920s through the 1940s, our understanding of the changes in blood chemistry accompanying milk fever and ketosis increased, as did our understanding of the underlying biology. In the 1950s and 1960s, workers studying ketosis and energy metabolism began to evaluate changes in lipid metabolism reflected by concentrations of circulating nonesterified fatty acids; furthermore, initial development occurred for on-farm tests of milk ketones. During the 1970s, blood metabolic profiling was applied to dairy farms but found to be of varied and limited usefulness. The turning point occurred when large epidemiologic studies of periparturient cow disease were pioneered in the United States, Canada, and Europe in the 1980s; these studies further solidified our understanding of risk factors and epidemiological interrelationships among disease, production, and reproduction. In the early 1990s, scientists first incorporated indicators of metabolic health into large observational studies and determined important epidemiological relationships between these indicators and outcomes of interest. This field of study blossomed during the 2000s as several research groups conducted multiple investigations into metabolic indicators related to energy metabolism and began to develop cow-level thresholds and herd-level alarms for use in monitoring and management. This work was accompanied by additional studies to validate point-of-care instruments that could be used to implement these strategies at the cow and herd levels. Work in the 2000s continued to identify and evaluate other physiological indicators of inflammation and oxidative stress; however, these have yet to be incorporated into large-scale cohort studies. Finally, use of technology (e.g., activity monitoring, cow-monitoring collars and tags, milk-based analysis using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy) continues to receive significant attention going forward to eventually allow for real-time and automatic monitoring of metabolic indicators and improved health and herd management on dairy farms.