50 THE TREATMENT AND PREVENTION
OF ABOMASAL DISPLACEMENT By Keith Cutler, Endell Vet Group, Salisbury
he symptoms are often typical; a cow shortly after calving, in the first weeks of a new lactation suddenly suffering a significant milk-drop will always ring alarm bells. The diagnosis can usually be confirmed fairly easily by careful auscultation of the abdomen with a high-pitched ping audible on percussion and splashing on ballottement.
T
Another displaced abomasum, or more accurately dilation as the organ fills and then becomes distended with gas. This may be followed by displacement either to the left under the rumen or to the right. A right displacement may result in a torsion preventing the passage of gut content either into or more importantly out of the abomasum. This then leads to an animal which deteriorates rapidly unless urgent action is taken.
Fortunately this is a situation which we know how to resolve. In the case of right-displaced abomasum with torsion of the organ there is no debate. Immediate surgery is required to correct the torsion and save the animal’s life.
Where the displacement is to the left the condition is not life-
threatening and options exist all with the aim of returning the abomasum to its normal anatomical position and then usually fixing it in place. Most commonly these options might include various surgical approaches in either the standing or recumbent animal or rolling and ‘toggling’ the cow. Success can, in the absence of complicating factors, be confidently predicted with published literature showing the method of choice to be the one that the vet is most familiar with.
But is this really treatment and what does success look like? Surely treatment should be aimed at the causes of the condition rather than simply returning the abomasum to its normal position and fixing it there? Success, therefore, given the inevitable ongoing compromise to production and fertility irrespective of any welfare considerations, must be measured in terms of prevention.
In order to develop treatment protocols and management strategies to prevent displaced abomasums we need to understand why they occur. Debate about this continues
and although understanding of the causes of the condition is improving it remains incomplete. A generation ago, when the dominant dairy breed in this country was the British Friesian, heifers calved for the first time at three years of age, winter feed was often based on hay with kale and concentrates in the parlour and lactation yields of 6000l were good, displaced abomasums just did not happen.
Now with the milk machine that is the Holstein being fed a total mixed ration based on maize silage, grass silage and straights and producing an average lactation yield of 10,000l not only are displaced abomasums much more common, but some authorities consider a 10% prevalence acceptable. Is the difference genetic or yield or feed associated?
When I was at vet school in the 1980s we were taught that the delivery of the calf left a ‘space’ in the cow’s abdomen which the abomasum, which is inherently unstable, would flip into unless the rumen was full of long fibre. We now laugh at the simplicity of this theory,
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