A Systematic Review of Bovine Respiratory Disease Diagnosis Focused on Diagnostic Confirmation, Early Detection, and Prediction of Unfavorable Outcomes in Feedlot Cattle

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Key points

  • Serum haptoglobin concentrations are useful to confirm bovine respiratory disease (BRD) but several other parameters are not useful or need further research.

  • Feed intake measurements, changes in cattle behavior, infrared thermography, and reticulorumen boluses have been successfully used for early disease detection.

  • Prognostic methods using routinely collected treatment and cohort data at the time of treatment can be used to identify cattle at risk of unfavorable outcome.

Definitions for the Search

The systematic review included confirmation, early disease detection, and modalities to estimate post-therapeutic prognosis or predict unfavorable or fatal outcomes of BRD. Definitions for outcomes included in the review are as follows:

  • 1.

    The case definition of BRD in the included manuscripts has to be based on a minimum of clinical signs of respiratory disease and elevated rectal temperature (threshold varied among studies, but ≥39.5°C).

  • 2.

    Confirmatory tests are laboratory and other tests used to

Results and discussion

The literature search including evaluation of titles and abstracts identified 71 studies for full-text screening. After complete review of the manuscript, 42 were excluded for the following reasons: 2 described technique development; 23 presented an outcome that was not diagnostic confirmation, early detection related, or prognosis; 11 reported detection methods for single pathogens outside the context of BRD; 2 were review papers; 2 had no full-text available; and 2 described only chronic

Implications and limitations

Results of this systematic review enable veterinarians, researchers, and producers to compare the various methods and technologies currently available to confirm and detect BRD and predict detrimental BRD outcome. Economic considerations of methods to confirm and early detect BRD or prognostic methods should always precede investment in commercial feedlots. One study suggested early detection methods need to cost less than CAD 4.06 per steer to improve economic revenues for commercial feedlots

Summary

Numerous methods have been examined to improve BRD diagnosis related to confirmation, early detection, and estimating prognosis. Existing evidence supports the use of HAP to confirm BRD status, but there was limited value for WBC counts and bacteriology in confirming BRD cases. Initial studies using breath analysis, lung ultrasonography, and percutaneous lung biopsy did not provide promising results for BRD confirmation. Early detection of BRD has been successfully performed using IRT, ruminal

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      Other general clinical signs of disease reported in the included studies were depression or depressed mental status and decreased feed intake or anorexia. Depression and appetite changes are considered to be early signs of BRD in feedlot calves (Wolfger et al., 2015a,b; Jackson et al., 2016; Toaff-Rosenstein et al., 2016). In dairy calves experimentally infected with Mannheimia haemolytica, the change in feed intake and behavior are early indicators of disease progression (Hixson et al., 2018).

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