Genetic and Environmental Components of Metabolic Diseases and Lameness in Cattle

Metabolic diseases including displaced abomasum, ketosis, and lameness have substantial impact on the productivity of beef and dairy cattle herds. Laminitis has been associated to nutritional effects causing metabolic disorders. These diseases are more prevalent in dairy herds and their impact in production is more extreme in dairy cattle than in beef cattle. Thus, the stronger signal of disease incidence in dairy herds offers a model to further the understanding of the factors influencing the incidence of these diseases in beef cattle. The objective of this study was to assess the impact of non-genetic and genetic factors on the incidence of displaced abomasum, lameness, and ketosis. Health records were analyzed from approximately 6200 records from Holstein cows across 4 U.S. regions. Two indicators of these diseases were studied: binomial detection of at least one disease; and multinomial detection of none, at least one, and at least 2 diseases in one lactation. The fixed effects explanatory variables included parity, season, milk yield level (high and low), region, body condition score, and sire was included as random effect. Parity, season and milk yield level had significant effects on both disease indicators. The binomial probability of disease and the multinomial probability of multiple diseases were higher with higher parity, in summer relative to winter, and in high producing cows relative to low producing cows. The heritability estimates of the binomial and multinomial disease indicators were 0.28 and 0.3, respectively. The heritability estimates for incidences of displaced abomasum, lameness and ketosis were 0.33, 0.16, and 0.19, respectively. Our findings suggest that the three diseases share both the non-genetic and genetic components and that management practices and genetic selection to reduce the incidence of one or two of these diseases will reduce the incidence of the remainder diseases. These findings contribute to an animal health project (USDANIFAILLU538909) and a multistate project database (USDANIFAAFRI003542) for direct measures of health and fertility in cattle.