Milk Fever: Reductionist Versus Systems Veterinary Approach

Abstract

Milk fever affects mostly multiparous and high-performance dairy cows that are close to calving and at the beginning of lactation. While much is known about milk fever, the real cause of failure in the Ca homeostatic mechanism remains unanswered, and, despite the considerable number of hypotheses presented over the years, milk fever still remains a complex and not very well understood disease of dairy cattle. From the recent “omics” studies, it is obvious that Ca is not the only perturbed variable in the organism of a cow affected by milk fever. Therefore, the complexity of the pathobiology of this disease makes it necessary to consider it from a systems veterinary perspective instead of the reductionist view only. A new approach is necessary in order to clarify and better understand the pathobiology of milk fever. Systems biology sciences have modestly contributed to the identification of multiple unknown alterations in cows with milk fever including unidentified QTL, a number of genes and proteins with altered expressions as well as a number of metabolic changes. A combination of the omics sciences will offer great possibilities for animal health scientists to incorporate all the information generated and study component-to-component interactions and the dynamic communications that result from them.