Diagnosis and Management of Negative Energy Balance and Associated Production Diseases in Bovines

Incidence of metabolic diseases particularly those arising due to negative energy balance has increased many fold during the past few decades due to adoption of intensive dairy farming. Metabolic diseases occur due to imbalance between input and output of nutrients and may appear in clinical or subclinical form causing huge economic losses to dairy farmers. Measurement of body condition score, subcutaneous fat thickness, Compton Metabolic profiling, reticular temperature monitoring, estimation of blood levels of E-Hydroxy butyrate (BHBA) and non-esterified fatty acid concentrations (NEFA) can help preventing incidence of metabolic diseases in high yielding cattle reared in large herds. Recently use of gluconeogenic precursors, rumen-protected choline, somatotropins and other hormones have been reported to be very effective in prevention and treatment of metabolic diseases arising due to energy imbalances. There is a need to develop cow side tests for early diagnosis of production diseases in dairy cattle.