The internal environment of Slovak spotted dairy cows in the postpartal period

The postpartal period in high-yielding dairy cows can be characterized as a time when animal has to undergo several important changes affecting all the organism. After pregnancy and parturition, organism has to adapt itself to the lactation and this stressing experience contributes to the high incidence of health disorders. These include ketosis, fatty liver, milk fever, retained placenta, metritis, mastitis, laminitis, and other metabolic and reproductive disorders. They may become clinically manifested in later stages of the reproduction cycle but have their primary cause in early postpartal period. To overcome these problems, every farmer has to practice good herd health management, especially when considering the transition period. To discover the weak points of the herd management we can use some indices that can be determined from the blood samples of dairy cows after partuition. We collected blood samples from 170 dairy cows of Slovak spotted breed 1 to 8 weeks after parturition. None of them manifested clinical signs of any illness. We divided them into the 6 groups depending on the number of weeks post partum.We observed and evaluated the main blood-chemistry parameters of energy and liver metabolism (glukose, triglycerides, total lipids, total cholesterol, non-esterified fatty acids, beta-hydroxybutyrate, total bilirubin), protein metabolism (total immunoglobulins, total protein, albumine, Creatinin, urea) and levels of some serum enzymes (AST, GGT, ALP, CPK, LDH). Even though there were no alterations in the health status present in that time, we found out that some indices, mostly of energy and liver metabolism, such as serum levels of non-esterified fatty acids, triglycerids, etc. were altered. This fact can help us to trace the potentially threatened individuals and to iniciate the steps that would minimize further damage.