Metabolic Disorders of Transition Dairy Cows: Symptoms, Etiology and Prevention

The transition period is often defined as the interval beginning three weeks precalving and ending three weeks postcalving. It is a period where the dairy cow undergoes tremendous metabolic, physiological and nutritional changes to ensure provision of adequate nutrients for processes of calving and milk production. If the dairy cow cannot adapt quickly to these challenges - that indeed is happened for most of modern dairy cows- she face different metabolic disorders. The occurrence of health problems hence is clearly a major complicating factor for subsequent productive, reproductive performance and herd profitability that resulting in substantial economic losses. Therefore, control of metabolic disorders is crucially important for modern dairy herds as during the past 20 years a huge amount of experiments has focused on this field. To control and prevention from these disorders, exact understanding of each disorder is inevitable.