Association of neonatal serum immunoglobulin G1 concentration with health and performance in beef calves

Abstract

By use of likelihood ratios, the threshold of serum IgG1 concentration for optimal health and performance of calves was higher than values reported previously. Implementation and maintenance of management and intervention strategies designed for early detection and treatment of calves at risk for failure of passive transfer will likely result in increases in preweaning health and performance parameters.

Risk Factors Associated with Passive Immunity, Health, Birth Weight and Growth Performance in Lambs: II. Effects of Passive Immunity and Some Risk Factors on Growth Performance During the First 12 Weeks of Life

“…Similar results were reported for dairy heifer calves [18,23,25] , dairy healthy goats [21,22] , beef calves [17,24] and healthy buffalo calves [19] . Our study determined a significant positive linear correlation between SIgG-24 and body weight at day 28 and ADG from birth to day 28 as reported by a single previous study [10] but this study was conducted only 20 healthy lambs.…”

“…Recent studies have shown that passive immunity in newborn ruminants [17][18][19][20][21][22] not only helps to prevent disease but also enhances growth performance. However, the relationship between growth performance and passive immunity in lambs was studied for only healthy and small number of lambs (generally <40) and the period generally restricted to neonatal period (first 28 days of life) [10,15,20] .…”

“…PTI appears to help predict health and productivity in juvenile ruminants, both before and after the neonatal period [10,11] . Studies to date have indicated that there appear a significant linear correlation between passive immunity and growth performance in different periods during the first 6 months of life in beef [17] , dairy heifer [18] and buffalo [19] calves, as well as in dairy lambs [10,20] and dairy goat kids [21,22] . Furthermore, an association between PTI and first lactation, milk yield and milk fat content in dairy heifer calves [23] and pre-and post-weaning growth performance in crossbreed calves have been found [24,25] .…”

Electronic feeding behavioural data as indicators of health status in dairy calves

“…Net energy consumption was different between calves on the H, M and L planes of nutrition during the pre-BRD period (P < concentrate does not appear to augment immune function in dairy calves. Passive transfer of maternal immunoglobulin is important in determining the subsequent health and level of morbidity in the pre-weaned calf (Donovan et al, 1998;Dewell et al, 2006;Godden, 2008;Berge et al, 2009;Furman-Fratczak et al, 2011;Lorenz et al, 2011;Murray et al, 2014). However, consistent with other studies (Sivula et al, 1996b;Virtala et al, 1996), the level of maternally derived serum immunoglobulin (measured by the ZST test) did not affect the likelihood of a calf developing BRD during the pre-weaning period in this study.…”

Passive immunity transfer and serum constituents of crossbred calves

“…Immunoglobulin concentrations in precolostral calves are normally zero or very low; however, the presence of gamma globulins in serum is detectable just a few hours after colostrum intake. Calves that receive insufϐicient colostrum present a minimal increase in immunoglobulin levels in serum (Eckersall 2008), and FPIT is considered when IgG levels are below 800mg/dL 24 hours after birth, while concentrations above 1,500mg/ dL of serum IgG at that time are considered ideal for PIT (Dewell et al 2006, Waldner & Rosengren 2009). In our study, all the animals reached desirable levels of serum IgG through natural suckling.…”