Epidemiology of reproductive disorders in dairy cattle: associations among host characteristics, disease and production

Comparison between data mining methods to assess calving difficulty in cattle

“…This relationship could have resulted from the worse husbandry conditions on the farm, including poorer control of diffi cult calvings. However, this result is not entirely consistent with that reported by Gröhn et al (1990), who investigated diff erent factors aff ecting reproductive disorders in Finnish Ayrshires, and found that higher herd milk yield in the current lactation was associated with an increased risk of dystocia. On the other hand, the only herd-level factor included in the analysis of dystocia incidence in Irish Holstein-Friesians (Mee et al, 2011; i.e.…”

Clinical Disorders in Holstein Cows: Incidence and Associations among Lactational Risks Factors

“…We can say that more detailed and complex health data and reduction of a number of possible bias caused by breeders, for example, because of their different ability to treat some diseases without veterinary help and advice or their selective willingness to call veterinarians to individual animals with regard to their milk yield and breeding value, were preferred over the precision of diagnosis. The degree of these influences can be partly evaluated from the fact that, as opposed to our results, Gröhn et al (1989Gröhn et al ( , 1990a, even when having a much broader spectrum of diseases studied, had records on health problems in about half of lactations (33.3%). There were, however, noticed health disorders of at least one kind in 63.9% (53.6 to 76.4%) of lactations in our subset of five herds, in which records of all the evaluated health disorders were kept.…”

“…While some of the above-mentioned studies were based on records of therapy performed by a veterinarian (Saloniemi et al 1986;Gröhn et al 1989Gröhn et al , 1990aGröhn et al , 1990bGröhn et al , 1994Rajala and Gröhn 1998) or veterinary diagnoses (Gröhn et al 1995), our study includes also those cases of disease which were not evaluated by a veterinarian but were diagnosed and sometimes even treated only by the breeder (e.g., clinical mastitis, claw diseases, parturient paresis, retained placenta). We can say that more detailed and complex health data and reduction of a number of possible bias caused by breeders, for example, because of their different ability to treat some diseases without veterinary help and advice or their selective willingness to call veterinarians to individual animals with regard to their milk yield and breeding value, were preferred over the precision of diagnosis.…”

“…Associations among health disorders in the current lactation have been widely studied in dairy cattle either as the main objective (Curtis et al 1983;Schukken et al 1988;Correa et al 1993;Massey et al 1993;Klerx and Smolders 1997;Rohrbach et al 1999) or more often as part of broader epidemiological studies evaluating also other potential risk factors (Dohoo and Martin 1984;Markusfeld 1987;Gröhn et al 1989Gröhn et al , 1990aGröhn et al , 1990bGröhn et al , 1994Gröhn et al , 1995Heuer et al 1999;Loeffler et al 1999).…”

“…Among important factors belong the breed as documented in Holstein and also other breeds (Saloniemi et al 1986;Bendixen et al 1987Bendixen et al , 1988Gröhn et al 1989Gröhn et al , 1990aGröhn et al , 1990bGröhn et al , 1994Oltenacu et al 1990;Rajala and Gröhn 1998). None of the above-mentioned studies, however, was carried out in Germany.…”