“…Influences of age, breed and sex on hematological parameters have been described for different species (Schalm et al, 1975;Mayr et al, 1979;Allen et al, 1984;Goto and Nishioka, 1989;Kieferndorf and Keller, 1990;Shiga et al, 1999;Čebulj-Kadunc et al, 2002Čebulj-Kadunc et al, , 2003Satué et al, 2009;Mikniene et al, 2014;Novotny et al, 2014), as well as for lymphocyte subset composition (Goto and Nishioka, 1989;Ohtsuka et al, 2002;Satué et al, 2010;Robbin et al, 2011;Macedo et al, 2013), innate immunity parameters (Krasimira et al, 2013), and cytokine serum/plasma levels or secretion in vitro (Bruunsgaard et al, 2001;Marik and Zaloga, 2001;Silberer et al, 2008;Fujiwara et al, 2012;Giraldo et al, 2013;Wray et al, 2013). Furthermore, circadian differences have been described for secreted cytokine levels (Pollmächer et al, 1996).…”