Usefulness of differential somatic cell count for udder health monitoring: Identifying referential values for differential somatic cell count in healthy quarters and quarters with subclinical mastitis

Abstract

Mastitis, an inflammation of the udder primarily caused by an IMI, is one of the most common diseases in dairy cattle. Somatic cell count has been widely used as an indicator of udder inflammation, assisting in the detection of subclinical mastitis. More recently, differential SCC (DSCC), which represents the combined proportion of lymphocytes and polymorphonuclear leukocytes, has become available for routine dairy milk screening, although it was not yet widely studied. Therefore, the objective of this study was to assess and compare the usefulness of quarter-level SCS or DSCC to predict the probability of subclinical mastitis. Additionally, our goals included estimating the sensitivity (Se) and specificity (Sp) of SCS and DSCC across all potential cut-off values. The current study was an observational study conducted on commercial dairy farms. Five dairy herds were selected using a convenience sampling. A Gaussian finite mixture model (GFMM) was applied to investigate the latent quarter subclinical mastitis status with either measurement, SCS or DSCC. Posterior values for SCS and DSCC obtained from the GFMM were used for predictive estimation of the parameters. The estimated SCS distribution for healthy quarters had a mean (SD) of 1.4 (1.3), and, for quarters with subclinical mastitis, it was 4.5 (2.4). For DSCC, the estimated mean was 55.6% (15.2) for healthy quarters, whereas it was 80.4% (6.4) for quarters with subclinical mastitis. The most discriminant cut-off for SCS, as indicated by the Youden index, was 3.0, corresponding to exactly 100,000 cells/mL. At this threshold, the Se and Sp of SCS were 0.73 (95% Bayesian credible interval [BCI]: 0.70–0.77) and 0.90 (95% BCI: 0.89–0.91), respectively. The most discriminant cut-off point for DSCC was 70.0%, with corresponding Se and Sp values of 0.95 (0.93, 0.96) and 0.83 (0.81, 0.85), respectively. For the SCS analysis, we obtained predictive probabilities of subclinical mastitis approaching 0 and 100%, with only a narrow range of SCS results yielding intermediate probabilities. On the other hand, predictive probabilities ranging from 0 to 90% were obtained for DSCC analysis, with a large range of DSCC results presenting intermediate probabilities. Thus, SCS seemed to surpass DSCC for predicting subclinical mastitis. These findings provided a foundation for future studies to further explore and validate the efficacy of GFMM for diagnostic tests yielding quantitative results.