Vet Med - Czech, 2019, 64(10):423-432 | DOI: 10.17221/67/2019-VETMED

The occurrence of mastitis and its effect on the milk malondialdehyde concentrations and blood enzymatic antioxidants in dairy cowsOriginal Paper

Frantisek Zigo^*,1, Juraj Elecko¹, Milan Vasil¹, Silvia Ondrasovicova², Zuzana Farkasova¹, Jana Malova³, Ladislav Takac⁴, Martina Zigova⁶, Jolanta Bujok7, Ewa Pecka-Kielb7, Petra Timkovicova-Lackova⁵

¹ Department of Animal Breeding

² Department of Anatomy, Histology and Physiology

³ Department of Food Hygiene and Technology

⁴ Institute of Judicial and Public Veterinary Medicine and Economics

⁵ Institute of Nutrition, Dietetics and Feed Production, University of Veterinary Medicine and Pharmacy, KoĹĄice, Slovakia

⁶ Department of Pharmacology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Pavol Jozef Šafárik in Košice, Košice, Slovakia

⁷ Department of Biostructure and Animal Physiology, Wroclaw University of Environmental and Life Sciences, Wroclaw, Poland

Early identification of mastitis is a serious challenge for dairy farmers and veterinarians in ensuring the health of an animal and the hygienic quality of the produced milk. The purpose of this study was to detect the occurrence and aetiology of mastitis in a dairy herd of 153 milked cows localised in a farm in west Slovakia. During the complex investigation, 606 quarter milk samples were examined (6 quarters were discarded) and classified based on the clinical status, the presence of abnormal udder secretions, the result of the California mastitis test (CMT), the somatic cell count (SCC) and the bacteriological identification of the pathogens causing the intramammary infection (IMI). The study was augmented by the detection of malondialdehyde (MDA) in the milk and the measurements of the blood enzymatic activities of glutathione peroxidase (GPx) and superoxide dismutase (SOD) as potential biomarkers for the udder health screening. A positive CMT score was recorded in 19.5% (118) of the examined quarters and 12.5% (76) of the quarters were infected with bacterial pathogens causing latent mastitis (LM; 1.3%), subclinical mastitis (SM; 8.3%), and clinical mastitis (CM; 2.9%). The most commonly isolated bacteria from the infected quarters were coagulase-negative staphylococci (55.2%), Staphylococcus aureus (11.8%) and streptococci (10.5%). The concentration of MDA and SCC were significantly higher from both the SM and CM cases than in the milk samples from the healthy cows, while the blood activities of SOD and GPx were lower in the cows with CM compared to the healthy cows. The higher MDA concentrations in the SM and CM milk observed in this study showed the presence of an oxidative stress in the infected milk, accompanied by a decrease in the antioxidative enzymatic activity in the blood of the cows. Therefore, the measurement of the milk MDA concentration and the activity of the blood SOD and GPx may prove insightful for the better screening of the udder health in the early diagnosis of mastitis.

Keywords: milking; biomarkers; lipid peroxidation; udder health; staphylococci

Published: October 31, 2019  Show citation