Investigation of the association between the test day milk fat–protein ratio and clinical mastitis using a Poisson regression approach for analysis of time-to-event data

Abstract

The objective of the present study was to investigate the association between the milk fat–protein ratio and the incidence rate of clinical mastitis including repeated cases of clinical mastitis to determine the usefulness of this association to monitor metabolic disorders as risk factors for udder health. Herd records from 10 dairy herds of Holstein cows in Saxony, Germany, from September 2005–2011 (36,827 lactations of 17,657 cows) were used for statistical analysis. A mixed Poisson regression model with the weekly incidence rate of clinical mastitis as outcome variable was fitted. The model included repeated events of the outcome, time-varying covariates and multilevel clustering. Because the recording of clinical mastitis might have been imperfect, a probabilistic bias analysis was conducted to assess the impact of the misclassification of clinical mastitis on the conventional results.

The lactational incidence of clinical mastitis was 38.2%. In 36.2% and 34.9% of the lactations, there was at least one dairy herd test day with a fat–protein ratio of <1.0 or >1.5, respectively. Misclassification of clinical mastitis was assumed to have resulted in bias towards the null. A clinical mastitis case increased the incidence rate of following cases of the same cow. Fat–protein ratios of <1.0 and >1.5 were associated with higher incidence rates of clinical mastitis depending on week in milk. The effect of a fat–protein ratio >1.5 on the incidence rate of clinical mastitis increased considerably over the course of lactation, whereas the effect of a fat–protein ratio <1.0 decreased. Fat–protein ratios <1.0 or >1.5 on the precedent test days of all cows irrespective of their time in milk seemed to be better predictors for clinical mastitis than the first test day results per lactation.