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Research Note

Rethink Transition Immune Response

Higher rates of health care and culling continue to occur on dairy farms during the transition period from gestation into lactation, with big impacts on farm profitability. Despite decades of research and industry advances, the peripaturient period continues to challenge dairy producers, nutritionists, and veterinarians.

However, recent research into immune activation and the ensuing inflammation during transition provides insight as to what’s healthy versus pathological — when to intervene or leave well-enough alone.

owa State’s Dr. Lance Baumgard has emphasized that the best indicators of a healthy transition are high feed intake and milk yield. 

Going deeper, Baumgard has noted that changes in concentrations of circulating NEFA (non-esterified fatty acids), ketones, and calcium during transition reflect:

  • Normal partitioning of nutrients in healthy, high-producing cows
  • Consequences of immune activation and knock-on effects, likely stemming from metritis, mastitis, pneumonia, or gut inflammation

Normal immune activation

“It’s well established,” Baumgard says, “that some level of immune activation and the inevitable inflammatory response are normal during transition.”

Sources of immune activation likely include the mammary gland, tissue trauma during calving, and the gastrointestinal tract. Abnormal or excessive inflammation becomes pathological, reducing feed intake and causing low circulating calcium (hypocalcemia), which leads to subclinical and potentially clinical milk fever. 

“What’s important,” Baumgard says, “is the magnitude of the immune response. If it is in the normal range for a high producing cow, then it is likely to correlate with higher milk production.”

So, treating subclinical hypocalcemia in high producing cows during transition is not likely to improve milk yield and it’s unnecessarily going to add to production costs.

Causation or correlation?

“Rethinking the transition immune response,” Baumgard adds, “involves shifting the paradigm to consider low feed intake, high NEFA, hyperketonemia (high serum ketones), and hypocalcemia as symptoms… a reflection of prior immune activation.” 

Recent studies at Iowa State using intravenous lipopolysaccharide in early lactation cows suggests that immune function does not appear to be “suppressed”. Rather, the researchers note, “many aspects of the immune response are seemingly functionally robust.”

Questions?

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