Stress can make cows more prone to disease, says the journal

Stress can make cows more prone to disease, says new research. This could help explain why exposure to viruses or bacteria affects some animals and not others, and how individual stress levels affect the process of infection and the severity of the disease.

Scientists from the University of Saskatchewan's Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization (VIDO) in Canada have found that stress in proteins and other compounds can help predict disease susceptibility.

Principal investigator Dr Palok Aich said: "Our results could someday enable doctors or veterinarians to predict whether a disease will develop and how severe it might be from a body fluid sample such as blood. These findings will help improve treatment plans for possible disease outcomes."

The discovery was made during a study of bovine respiratory disease (BRD), a cattle disease linked to stress, which causes over half of all feedlot deaths.

Blood samples revealed that stress biomarkers were linked to disease severity. The researchers said it was a good model to study the link between stress and disease, as BRD involves interaction between viral and bacterial infections.

"In BRD and certain human diseases such as influenza, the combination of a bacterial infection after an initial viral infection can be deadly," said VIDO senior scientist and co-investigator Dr Philip Griebel. "The more we can recognize the signs suggesting a poor disease outcome, the better we can manage or even prevent an illness."

Dr Aich said the next step was to link the biomarkers to a specific stressor, and to understand which stressors were most responsible for increasing disease susceptibility.

The study has been published in OMICS: A Journal of Integrative Biology.

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