Abstract
BackgroundJoint swelling and lameness are the most obvious and persistent clinical signs of infectious arthritis in piglets. For a positive treatment effect of piglets with arthritis, early initiated treatments with antibiotics are desired. Hitherto pain-reducing drugs have rarely been used within veterinary medicine, but the potential of non steroid anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAID) are interesting from an animal welfare perspective. Therefore, the aim of this study was to compare the long term efficiency of treating lameness with and without pain relief. Further, the incidences of affected joints in lame piglets were analysed.ResultsIn total 415 of the 6,787 liveborn piglets included in the study were diagnosed with lameness (6.1 %). Around 86 % of these diagnoses took place during the first 3 weeks of life. There was no difference in the incidence of lameness between the sexes, but lameness was most commonly diagnosed in the offspring to old sows (>4 parturitions). Lameness was diagnosed in about every second litter and on average about two pigs were diagnosed in the affected litters. The incidence of affected litters as well as affected piglets increased with ageing of the sows.Treatments with antibiotics solely and in combination with NSAID improved (P < 0.01 to 0.001) the clinical status from day to day, but the clinical response did not differ between the two treatment groups.Piglets that remained healthy were 1.1 and 1.7 kg heavier (P < 0.001) than piglets diagnosed with lameness at 5 and 9 weeks of age, respectively. There were no differences in piglet body weights between the treatment strategies at any time.ConclusionsThe clinical response to penicillin was good. It was neither improved nor reduced by a concurrent administration of NSAIDs. Nevertheless NSAIDs may improve the animal welfare due to pain relief. An important finding of this study was that decreasing pain due to lameness not was negative in a long term perspective, i.e. reducing pain did not lead to overstrain of affected joints and no clinical signs of adverse effects were noted. Therefore the use of NSAIDs ought to be considered to improve the animal welfare, at least in severe cases.
Highlights
Joint swelling and lameness are the most obvious and persistent clinical signs of infectious arthritis in piglets
Clinical effect of treatments Both treatment strategies, with penicillin solely or with penicillin in combination with non steroid anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAID), improved (P < 0.01 to 0.001) the clinical status from day to day but the treatment efficacy did not differ between the groups
Piglets diagnosed with lameness had a reduced weight gain
Summary
Joint swelling and lameness are the most obvious and persistent clinical signs of infectious arthritis in piglets. For a positive treatment effect of piglets with arthritis, early initiated treatments with antibiotics are desired. Skin lesions in piglets are presumably mainly a result of contact with the floor, especially during suckling [4,5,6,7,8]. Apart from animal suffering, lameness contributes to losses in terms of dead piglets, decreased growth an increased use of manual labour and of antibiotics [16, 17]. The therapy of lame piglets ought to include measures aimed to decrease pain and thereby minimize any adverse effect on feed intake [19]
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