Invited review: β-hydroxybutyrate concentration in blood and milk and its associations with cow performance

Abstract

Hyperketonemia (HYK) is one of the most frequent and costly metabolic disorders in high-producing dairy cows and its diagnosis is based on β-hydroxybutyrate (BHB) concentration in blood. In the last 10 years, the number of papers that have dealt with the impact of elevated BHB levels in dairy cattle has increased. Therefore, this paper reviewed the recent literature on BHB concentration in blood and milk, and its relationships with dairy cow health and performance, and farm profitability. Most studies applied the threshold of 1.2 mmol/l of BHB concentration in blood to indicate HYK; several authors considered BHB concentrations between 1.2 and 2.9 mmol/l as subclinical ketosis, and values ⩾3.0 mmol/l as clinical ketosis. Results on HYK frequency (prevalence and incidence) and cow performance varied according to parity and days in milk, being greater in multiparous than in primiparous cows, and in the first 2 weeks of lactation than in later stages. Hyperketonemia has been associated with greater milk fat content, fat-to-protein ratio and energy-corrected milk, and lower protein and urea nitrogen in milk. The relationships with milk yield and somatic cell count are still controversial. In general, HYK impairs health of dairy cows by increasing the risk of the onset of other early lactation diseases, and it negatively affects reproductive performance. The economic cost of HYK is mainly due to impaired reproductive performance and milk loss. From a genetic point of view, results from the literature suggested the feasibility of selecting cows with low susceptibility to HYK. The present review highlights that milk is the most promising matrix to identify HYK, because it is easy to sample and allows a complete screening of the herd through BHB concentration predicted using mid-IR spectroscopy during routine milk recording. Further research is needed to validate accurate and convenient methods to discriminate between cows in risk of HYK and healthy animals in field conditions and to support farmers to achieve an early detection and minimise the economic losses.

Infrared Spectrometry as a High-Throughput Phenotyping Technology to Predict Complex Traits in Livestock Systems

“…Likewise, the feasibility of using spectral data to predict glucose, NEFA, BUN, and IGF-1 were also investigated in this review ( Table 10). The R 2 reported by the authors varied between 0.20 (glucose; Benedet et al, 2019) to 0.61 (IGF-1; Grelet et al, 2019) in the validation set.…”

“…Subclinical hyperketonemia or ketosis is one of the most frequent diseases in dairy cattle and it is characterized by increased concentrations of the ketone bodies acetoacetate, β-hydroxybutyrate (BHB), and acetone in blood, milk, and urine (Hansen, 1999). Additionally, blood metabolites such as glucose, non-esterified fatty acids (NEFA), blood urea nitrogen (BUN), and insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1), and glutamic oxaloacetic transaminase (GOT) might also be used as indicators of metabolic status in dairy cows (Fenwick et al, 2008;Benedet et al, 2019;Grelet et al, 2019). Blood metabolic profile testing is the gold standard for diagnosis, however, it is invasive, logistically challenging, and costly (Luke et al, 2019).…”

Genetic Evaluation of Reproductive and Metabolic Disorders and Displaced Abomasum in Czech Holstein Cows

“…different methods of data collection, different calculation techniques and lengths of interval at risk. For example Kelton et al (1998) suggested two approaches for retrospective and current analysis, and Østerås et al (2007) defined the base population as the number of cow-years, while Pryce et al (2016) or Benedet et al (2019) pointed out the difference between the prevalence and incidence of disease, as these terms are not always used correctly, which made the interpretation of results difficult. Generally, Kelton et al (1998) stated in their older meta-analysis that the LIR ranged between 0.03 - 22.3% with median 6.5% for PAR, 1.3 -39.2% with median 8.6% for REP, 2.2 - 37.3% with median 10.1% for MET (different definition of the trait), 1.3 - 18.3% with median 4.8% for KET, 0.3 -6.3% with median 1.7% for left DA, and finally 1.0 -16.1% with median 8.0% for CYS.…”

“…For metabolic disorders, where under-reporting could be a challenge, a suitable predictor is often being suggested, which would be especially valuable, if it could be measured objectively (Pryce et al, 2016). Different studies have already been aimed at fat-to-protein ratio, β-hydroxybutyrate concentration in milk, or body condition score (Jamrozik et al, 2016;Benedet et al, 2019).…”

Variation of Blood Metabolites of Brown Swiss, Holstein-Friesian, and Simmental Cows

“…This trend was previously reported by Mäntysaari et al [25] for Nordic Red cows. The increase of blood BHB and NEFA concentrations with parity is generally expected [26,27]. However, elevated concentrations of BHB and NEFA in the blood of first-lactation cows could be due to their concurrent energy demands for growth and lactogenesis or a worse energy status than multiparous cows around calving [28,29].…”