Identifying constraints to health and production in the UK dairy goat industry :Subtheme; Colostrum

Research that informs the health and production of farmed dairy goats is sparse. Therefore, gaps in knowledge regarding current practices and concerns within the UK dairy goat industry were addressed by a postal survey of farmer members of the Milking Goat Association. Some 73% of farmers responded. Findings show extensive variation in farm practices. Farmers’ top priority for further research was kid health (79.5% of farmers), and pneumonia and diarrhoea were reported as the most prevalent illnesses of kids. The findings, alongside published literature and field experience, were used to inform the choice of a focused research topic for this Ph.D research. Kid health has important welfare and economic implications. Colostrum management is vital for kid health but sparsely researched. Therefore, three studies of goat colostrum were undertaken. Study one was an observational study on three commercial dairy goat farms that established baseline measures for the immunoglobulin, nutritional, and energy content of colostrum. Linear regression analyses established that Brix measures significantly predicted the mean ‘total solids’, energy, and immunoglobulin content of goat colostrum. In study two, Bland Altman analyses were used to quantify the reliability of Brix refractometer measures of colostrum, with results helpful for informing the methodology of study one as well as practice on farms. Study three was a single-farm study that measured the colostrum intakes of farmed dairy goat kids that were routinely removed from their mothers at birth and bottle-fed colostrum, providing baseline data for the quantities and timings of colostrum intakes achievable in bottle-fed kids during the first 13 hours of life when real-world factors are in play. These studies provide essential new baseline data for informing future research and guiding better colostrum management on farms and protecting the health, welfare, and production of the large numbers of kids born on commercial dairy goat farms

A case report of lameness in two dairy goat herds: a suspected combination of nutritional factors concurrent with treponeme infection

Background: Two dairy goat farms with high level of lameness in lactating animals were presented for further investigation. Farm 1 and Farm 2 presented with 37 and 67 % morbidity, respectively. Both farms had an all year round indoor system, feeding ad libitum concentrate with forage available at all times. Case presentation: The lameness was found to be based in the foot. Previous treatments consisting of biweekly footbathing with zinc sulphate, spraying lesions with oxytetracycline spray and packing lesions with copper crystals on a single occasion and single injections with long acting oxytetracycline had not been successful. Mild cases had signs of haemorrhaging in the white line or on the sole of the foot. Moderate cases showed under running of the wall horn or small areas of exposed sole corium. Severe cases would consist of horn or wall separation with the corium exposed and infected. In extreme cases only the wall horn of the claw remained, with a large area of necrotic tissue in the centre and no healthy corium visible. Only one animal was seen to have interdigital lesions. Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and culture of swabs taken from exposed corium and the interdigital space were negative for Dichelobacter nodosus but PCR for treponemes were positive in both the adults and the youngstock tested. Due to the high level of concentrate in the diet of these goats, nutrition was thought to contribute to the problem. Transcutaneous rumen fluid samples were taken and pH was measured on both farms, with 35 % of the samples below pH value 5.5. Conclusion: No definite diagnosis could be made. However, the results suggest both treponemes and nutrition play a role in the aetiology of the lameness. The initial sole or wall horn lesions were thought to be secondarily infected by treponemes. Further investigation is needed to definitively diagnose the cause and contributing factors for this lamenes

How does prosodic deficit impact naïve listeners recognition of emotion? An analysis with speakers affected by Parkinson's disease

Abstract This study aimed to understand the impact of the prosodic deficit in Parkinson's disease (PD) on the communicative effectiveness of vocal expression of emotion. Fourteen patients with PD and 13 healthy control subjects (HC) uttered the phrase "non è possible, non ora" ("It is not possible, not now") six times reading different emotional narrations. Three experts evaluated the PD subjects' vocal production in terms of their communicative effectiveness. The PD patients were divided into two groups: PD+ (with residual effectiveness) and PD− (with impaired effectiveness). The vocal productions were administered to 30 naïve listeners. They were requested to label the emotion they recognized and to make judgments about their communicative effectiveness. The PD speakers were perceived as less effective than the HC speakers in conveying emotions (especially fear and anger). The PD− group was the most impaired in the expression of emotion, suggesting that speech disorders impact differently at the same stage of the disease with varying degrees of severity

The Contribution of Cognitive Control Networks in Word Selection Processing in Parkinson’s Disease: Novel Insights from a Functional Connectivity Study

Data Availability Statement: The data presented in this study are available on request from the corresponding author due to ethical reasons.Supplementary Materials: The following supporting information can be downloaded at: https://www.mdpi.com/article/10.3390/brainsci14090913/s1, Table S1: Neuropsychological data of HC (healthy control) and PD (Parkinson’s disease) groups of participants.Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients are impaired in word production when the word has to be selected among competing alternatives requiring higher attentional resources. In PD, word selection processes are correlated with the structural integrity of the inferior frontal gyrus, which is critical for response selection, and the uncinate fasciculus, which is necessary for processing lexical information. In early PD, we investigated the role of the main cognitive large-scale networks, namely the salience network (SN), the central executive networks (CENs), and the default mode network (DMN), in word selection. Eighteen PD patients and sixteen healthy controls were required to derive nouns from verbs or generate verbs from nouns. Participants also underwent a resting-state functional MRI. Functional connectivity (FC) was examined using independent component analysis. Functional seeds for the SN, CENs, and DMN were defined as spheres, centered at the local activation maximum. Correlations were calculated between the FC of each functional seed and word production. A significant association between SN connectivity and task performance and, with less evidence, between CEN connectivity and the task requiring selection among a larger number of competitors, emerged in the PD group. These findings suggest the involvement of the SN and CEN in word selection in early PD, supporting the hypothesis of impaired executive control.This research received no external funding

Laminitis in dairy goats (Capra aegagrus hircus) on a low-forage diet

Dairy goats on high-concentrate diets attain high production levels, but at what cost? Here, ongoing lameness problems in a herd offered ad lib concentrates and roughages throughout their lifetime were investigated. Five severely affected, chronically lame animals were euthanased and examined postmortem. Foot pathology consisted of distortion of the claw shape and irregular fissures over the solar and bulbar horn with the distal phalanx rotated downwards on two claws. Rumen pH was measured between 5.26 and 5.46 with moderate rumen mucosa hyperkeratosis, and ulcerative, mild lymphocytic rumenitis. Feet showed irregular hyperplasia of the epidermal laminae with parakeratotic hyperkeratosis, especially in solar regions. Dense clusters of lymphocytes expanded the dermal laminae. Based on these findings, chronic laminitis was suspected. Ruminal hyperkeratosis was likely a result of prolonged periods of acidosis. The consequences of feeding a high-concentrate ration throughout the life of dairy goats need more research

IMPAIRMENT OF EMOTIONAL PROCESSING IN PARKINSON'S DISEASE: THE PRODUCTION AND RECOGNITION OF EMOTIONS CONVEYED BY FACES AND VOICES

La classica descrizione della Malattia di Parkinson (MP) come caratterizzata esclusivamente da sintomi motori è stata superata perché i pazienti sperimentano frequentemente, tra gli altri, anche disturbi dell'elaborazione emozionale che portano a difficoltà nell’esprimere e nel riconoscere le emozioni altrui dalla prosodia e dall'espressione facciale. Nella presente tesi è stato indagato, a livello comportamentale, se la MP può indurre modificazioni nella produzione e nel riconoscimento delle emozioni trasmesse dal volto e dalla voce. A livello neurostrutturale, sono state esplorate le alterazioni della materia grigia in una sottopopolazione di pazienti con MP, testando se le prestazioni ottenute nei vari compiti ideati per studiare l'elaborazione emozionale siano associate a indici di integrità strutturale. Nel complesso, le evidenze raccolte in questa tesi confermano che la MP è caratterizzata da un deficit nella produzione e nel riconoscimento delle espressioni facciali e vocali fin dall'esordio della malattia, che potrebbe essere spiegato non solo dal coinvolgimento funzionale delle vie dopaminergiche e dei gangli della base in questi processi, ma anche dal reclutamento di un più ampio network cerebrale sottostante l'elaborazione emozionale.The original description characterizing Parkinson’s Disease (PD) by motor symptoms has been updated because patients also frequently experience, among others, emotional‐processing impairments leading to difficulty in expressing and recognizing others’ emotions from prosody and facial expression. In the current thesis, it was investigated, at the behavioural level, if PD could induce modifications in the production and recognition of emotions conveyed by face and voice. At the neurostructural level, grey matter alterations in PD subgroup were explored, testing if the performance obtained in the various tasks devised to study the emotional processing is associated with indices of grey matter integrity in PD. Taken together, the evidence collected in this thesis confirms that PD is characterized by a deficit in the production and recognition of facial and vocal expressions from disease onset, which could be explained not only by the functional involvement of the dopaminergic pathways and basal ganglia in these processes, but also by the engagement of a more extensive network underlying emotional processing