Blood metabolic profile tests at dairy cattle farms as useful tools for animal health management

Abstract

Blood metabolic profile tests are simple cost-effective biochemical tests which are mostly used to identi-fy nutritional and/or management challenges in dairy cattle herds, but they also can be simply used to find animals which are clinically healthy, but really have some hidden problems like low production performance, reproductive diseases and/or long calving intervals and other sub-clinical diseases. Rou-tine metabolic profile tests commonly consist of blood glucose, urea, albumin, cholesterol, beta-hydroxybutyric acid and non-esterified fatty acids values, as well as sodium, potassium, chloride, calci-um, magnesium and inorganic phosphate levels. Briefly, the current review discusses blood metabolic profile tests, their importance, introduces an easy method for it, emphasises on the relation between blood metabolic profile parameters and many important sub-clinical diseases including ketosis, milk fever, mastitis, cystic ovaries, displaced abomasum and etc., and indicates that because of its simplicity, low cost and easy for analysis results, it can be considered as a good method for diagnosis of important diseases at dairy cattle farms.