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Practically Ranching
Join Matt Perrier as he visits weekly with interesting, thoughtful, entertaining individuals within the beef community. Conversations will inspire curiosity and creativity while maintaining the independent spirit and practical nature for which ranchers are known.
Practically Ranching
#48 - Brad White, Bovine Heart Disease
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Dr. Brad White is Director of the KSU Beef Cattle Institute a Professor of Production Medicine and Host of the BCI Cattle Chat podcast.
He wears a lot of hats, but in this week's episode, we'll explore collaborative work that he has recently been doing in the area of Bovine Heart Disease.
Called by a variety of names (non-infectious heart disease, bovine, congestive heart failure, mechanical heart failure, high altitude disease, brisket disease, AIP and others), it continues to be the topic of many industry discussions...especially in the feeding segment.
Phone: 785-532-5700
E-mail: bwhite@vet.k-state.edu
Thanks for joining us for episode 48 of practically ranching. I'm Matt Perrier. This week's guest is Dr. Brad white. Brad is the director of the Kansas state university beef cattle Institute. He's also a professor of production medicine at the vet school and host of the BCI cattle chat podcast. It's available every week. We're going to talk today about bovine heart disease. Now this is a diagnosis that's primarily made in feed yard, cattle. But it's one that's being discussed at a lot of industry events and meetings and research gatherings. And it's probably called by a lot of different terms by a lot of different folks. Uh, you may have heard it as non-infectious heart disease, bovine, congestive heart failure, mechanical heart failure. High altitude disease, brisket disease, even sometimes it's misdiagnosed as AIP or a number of other respiratory type, um, and heart ailments. But we're going to talk with Brad today about what it is and what we know about this disease, a little history about it, and then some of the theories, even some of the myths that may surround this. Uh, we'll get into some potential causes, um, potential correlations or. Connections to other other diseases and other issues and even other organs. Um, and Brad has been over the last couple of years, part of a collaborative effort to really get in and in mind some of the current data and literature that's out there. And also collect some additional data and try to get at some answers that that can help us address this issue from a kind of a holistic industry standpoint. You know, This bovine heart disease isn't necessarily something that may affect a ton of you directly. But it. Does appear to be increasing in prevalence. And, uh, again, as I said, a lot of folks are talking about it at the feed yard level. So I thought it was worth a discussion here with one of the scientists who's trying to help us to get at some of these answers. So enjoy this conversation as always, thanks a bunch for joining us here on the podcast. If you haven't already be sure and like, or follow the show and we'll be back again in a couple of weeks. Thanks. And God bless.
squadcaster-hg65_2_12-21-2023_125804got, I've even got notes today, man. I don't always have notes. I got notes for you,
Track 1All you have to have is letters after your name, and all of a sudden you all start preparing for these. That's not fair. Now I'm in trouble.
squadcaster-hg65_2_12-21-2023_125804Maybe we'll flip it. Yeah, maybe we'll flip it and I'll ask you questions.
Track 1That would be fun. That would be fun. You've been doing it longer than I have and have got a lot more under your belt,
squadcaster-hg65_2_12-21-2023_125804Yeah, but I'm not very good at it, so.
Mattuh, I've, I've learned a lot as I went along. Well, welcome Brad to practically Ranching. Sure. Appreciate you being on today.
squadcaster-hg65_2_12-21-2023_125804Well, I appreciate the invitation. Thanks for having me, man.
Track 1you bet. I'm gonna let you give your own introduction and bio to, uh, to the listeners, even though I know we share quite a few, so they may, may already know you very well, but go ahead. For those who don't know you, tell us a little about yourself.
squadcaster-hg65_2_12-21-2023_125804You bet. I'm Brad White, uh, work here at Kansas State University in the veterinary school and work with the Beef Cattle Institute, which is a group of different folks that, that tries to answer questions for the beef industry and, and work with nutritionists, geneticists, other veterinarians and, and different specialty areas. And. You, you and I have interacted some through through Kansas organizations, but we've also interacted through the podcast world 'cause we've got a podcast called Cattle Chat and you and I kind of got to know each other and through a variety of venues. So I appreciate you giving me the opportunity to come on and visit with you.
Track 1You bet. Well, appreciate you being here and all that. You all do. That's a, that's a fun one to listen to as well. And if you're not already a, a subscriber, a listener of BCI Cattle chat, I'd sure encourage you to, to do so. 'cause they, they cover a lot of topics every week and a lot of pertinent things for, for all of us in, in the beef industry and. A lot of brain power and a lot of, uh, current knowledge on that. So we appreciate you. So today, the thing, and we can talk about various asundry uh, numbers of, of topics because I know you're pretty well versed in a lot of them, but something that has been in a lot of the press recently and a lot of hall room discussions at meetings and the like. Has been and, and I guess I'm going to call it bovine congestive heart failure, and I think that's kind of the catchall term, even though it's known in feed yard world as a lot of different, sometimes maybe misdiagnosed terms. But tell us a little bit about first, what is bovine congestive heart failure? And then we'll get into a little more minutia and maybe even talk about what maybe it isn't.
squadcaster-hg65_2_12-21-2023_125804Awesome. So, uh, I will start out with, this is not really a secret, but a lot of people don't, uh, see this pattern when we have multiple names for something. So whether it's non-infectious heart disease, bovine, congestive heart failure, mechanical heart failure, high altitude disease, brisket disease, those are all, uh, in my mind, synonyms for this. When we have multiple names for something, that means we haven't quite got it figured out yet. So that is, That is one of the things that once we figure out exactly what something is, and then we all start using the same naming convention. There we are. So, I, I may even back up and I gave that whole list of names. Not all of those are universally recognized, but let's talk first before we get into what we, what we wanna talk about with heart disease. Let's talk about brisket disease and a little bit about the history. So some of us, when I went to veterinary school. We talked about brisket disease, and it's also known as high altitude sickness. And so we would see this in cattle and it was actually first identified. In the early 19 hundreds by some researchers out of Colorado State, about 1918, uh, and they found that when they took cattle to high altitudes, some, but not all of them would get what they would call brisket disease. And if you can, I'll, I'll just let you hazard a guess. Where do you think the most prominent area of swelling was?
Track 1The brisket.
squadcaster-hg65_2_12-21-2023_125804And The brisket right? So, yeah, for a hundred, yeah, we'll get your points for that. So, uh, essentially what would happen is the, the right heart wasn't working as well as it should. And so then that fluid builds up, which will be a theme that we'll talk about here later. And the fluid forms, what we would call dependent edema, which means basically you're getting fluid that's flowing to where gravity will let it, and so it's gonna end up in the brisket or along the ventral midline. And it's most obvious when that brisket really swells up. They have trouble breathing. And so from that, over the next 40, 50 years, we actually learned that we could do some testing to see which cattle were most susceptible to that. So if you've ever heard of PAP testing or PAP pulmonary art, arterial pressure, that PAP testing and really the group at Colorado State has pioneered this and and done a great job with being better able to predict which cattle are going to have More susceptibility to brisket disease. So the, what you'll do is with that PAP testing, you actually are testing that pressure to see if it's already high before we get to full altitude. The trick is here in Kansas, we don't have the level of altitudes that we can even effectively do a pap test because you have to be at some altitude to put a little bit of pressure on the system to see if they can, if you can test them, and then to decide if they can go up to higher altitude. So for the most part, and for most of my career, when we talk about heart disease and cattle. mostly talks about brisket disease, and because I've practiced in Missouri and have been here in Kansas for the last several years, we, we haven't had a lot of mountains to worry about cattle going up. So it, it hasn't been as much of an issue, but I think that history is important because what we're gonna talk about next is we're gonna differentiate that a little bit and talk about some of the, some of the similarities, but that's a little bit of the background. On where we've come from relative to heart disease knowledge,
Track 1Yeah, and that's what I remember the first time, and it's been, gosh, a decade or more ago when I started hearing folks kind of quietly talk about how, in their terms, Brisket disease was being seen at lower elevations.
squadcaster-hg65_2_12-21-2023_125804correct? Absolutely.
Track 1maybe it may be similar, but that would probably have been a little bit of a mis misnomer. Correct? Yeah. And, and so back on the pap testing, uh, what 5,500 feet elevation? Is that kind of the minimum of where you can effectively measure a set of of cattle for that?
squadcaster-hg65_2_12-21-2023_125804it sounds about right. I don't remember the specific number off the top of my head.
Track 1Yeah, I know, I know folks that, you know, you have to get at a certain base level before you can even measure that phenotype. And then a lot of folks, of course, in the seed stock world will do that with bulls to make, to make progress there. Okay, so bring us a little bit further in history. Um, and, and when we started asking more questions about these lower elevation of quote unquote brisket disease cases.
squadcaster-hg65_2_12-21-2023_125804Yeah, so, so as we talked about the, the traditional, typical brisket disease, those are cattle at elevation, we'd see heart disease. Um, when, when we start thinking about, in more recent years, what we've actually observed is we've started to see some, and I think you termed it, mechanical heart disease or non-infectious heart disease or congestive heart failure. So all three of those, I would say are the same. And I'm gonna stick on terminology for just a minute because two, a couple of those terms are, are pretty descriptive and maybe important. So non-infectious heart disease separates it from things like hardware disease. And when we talk about hardware and just to briefly. Review, uh, hardware is typically when cattle eat a piece of metal or we think of a wire. Then that wire goes to the reticulum, which is a part of the, digestive tract right in front of the room and, and that reticulum. Only sits probably even in an adult, probably about an inch or less from the heart. And so if you have a small piece of wire, it can pierce into through the diaphragm, into that Sac surrounding the heart and you end up with an infection. And so you can end up with, and I bring that up because it's actually, it's not common, but it is, when we talk about symptoms of heart disease that will cause similar symptoms of heart disease. Uh, and we'll talk about those symptoms in a minute, but, so when we say non-infectious heart disease. We're not talking about hardware, we're also not talking about, there are a few bacteria that can cause an infection actually in the heart muscle itself, and we're not talking about those, so we'll separate those off to the side when we say Non-infectious heart disease. When we say mechanical heart failure, so mechanical heart failure, meaning that that heart has actually changed in size and shape and that heart is not able to do its job as well. So that muscle essentially you can think of, it's not necessarily getting flabby, but it's getting much more Spread out thinner and it can't pump as well. So what actually is happening in those cattle is it's not pumping blood as well as it should be, which leads us to the heart failure. The third description that you use was congestive heart failure, and we often talk about congestive heart failure as it it means we're getting some of that congestion. I described it earlier as edema, but essentially what's happening is often. These are right-sided heart failure. So the right side of the heart is pumping blood to the lungs. If there's a reason we can't get blood into the, into the lungs, it starts to back up in the veins and or doesn't drain as well, which then the body says, Hey, my veins can only get so big. So we gotta start taking some of that fluid out of the veins, which leads to fluid and congestion in other areas. So we described earlier, you end up with that edema, you end up with some of the other things. In fact, in some of these cases. Uh, if we think about lesions of the heart, especially right-sided, congestive heart failure, if that right side of the heart is not working. Our liver is basically the filter for the body, so all the veins we're going through that liver, and then we go to the right side of the heart. Well, if the right side of the heart stops working as well, the liver starts to get congested. You may even hear the term that some people will use is nutmeg liver, because that Uh, liver looks like the inside of a nutmeg if you've never looked inside of a nutmeg, which I hadn't until we started talking about nutmeg liver. So I did what any good person would do, and I Googled it and it does look, and I, I could only say. Just based on my backwards experience that the liver, the nutmeg actually looks like the inside of one of these livers, but most people would go the other direction. So that liver gets congested and once the liver gets congested, then we can actually get fluid that starts to build up in the abdomen. We can get fluid that starts to build up in the chest around those animals. And as you can imagine, and this will become important as our discussion goes forward. The typical clinical signs of these cattle are, if I'm not having good circulatory system, I'm not getting good oxygenation of my blood, I'm gonna be lethargic, I'm gonna be depressed, I'm not gonna be wanting to get around as well as everybody else. And then as this progresses towards the end stages, we'll talk about cattle that are open mouth breathing. You can actually see some of that swelling. You can see some of the areas, uh, that are problematic. the Typical presentation or prototypical presentation would be you talk about a, uh, a big animal that's open mouth breathing and they've got their elbows stuck away from their chest because they're trying to keep their elbows away so that it's easier to breathe and they've got fluid in there. Uh, I would say it's pretty rare. That, that we see those, we do see those, but it's not as as common as some of the other case presentations that we see. So I, I think it's important when we think about names and all of those names in my opinion, are appropriate. We don't have a standard name, but I kind of like talking through the naming part because it helps me remember what are all the symptoms and what's actually going on in the physiology and the body of that. Of that animal. One, one thing that I would say from these cases, uh, we have to try to differentiate this from some of our typical syndromes that we see in cattle. And, and when we talk about feeder cattle or fat cattle, um, in those cattle, respiratory disease is one of the things that we see frequently. Uh, heart disease, especially early in the process. Very hard to differentiate clinically from respiratory disease because those other signs I mentioned, the edema, some of the other stuff, we typically don't see those till later. And I would say in most of the cases that I have observed in feedlots, we often do not see the B brisket edema. We don't see a lot of ventral edema along the chest or along the bottom of the body at the time that those calves have succumbeded to heart disease. It's not saying it doesn't happen. But it wouldn't be the first thing I would look for in, in these cattle.
Track 1So when do we see this occur? Is it at one stage of the growth pattern? Is it one age? Is it one segment? When all are we seeing this?
squadcaster-hg65_2_12-21-2023_125804Excellent question. So and, and this is a, this is one of the things that we started, and I'll, I'll be, uh, fully transparent. We've done research on heart disease, we've done some funded research. We've worked with other researchers that have done heart disease. So some of the things that I'll share with you today will be from things that we have firsthand done, some of the things I'll share with you. Will be from what other researchers have done. But I'm happy to provide any documentation or follow up if anybody has follow up questions. So I'll, I'll preface it with that.
Track 1Sure.
squadcaster-hg65_2_12-21-2023_125804Um, and, and I guess as you're thinking about heart disease, most of us, I. Would think this sounds like a disease that may happen later in life. and and part of our frame of reference when we think about people and cattle are not people and people are not cattle. But when we think about people and we think about cardiovascular failure, we often think about people older in life. And it's easy to try to make that translation back to, uh, Cattle. I'm not sure that that analogy holds because we're actually dealing with a different syndrome here. And early reports were that this occurs late in the feeding phase. And this is an area that I think is really important to talk about. So we actually did some research and some of the research that we did, we did research, uh, looking at US cattle. We did research looking at US and Canadian cattle. Uh, in one of our studies there was about 1.8 million head. So we had a fair number of cattle there that we could look at to specifically answer your question, at least relative to the feeding phase. When does this occur? And when we looked at those cattle, of course all of those didn't have heart disease, but we had a several thousand that did. When you look at the average days on feed at the time of heart disease diagnosis, it was about 170. Now. That would go along with, well, that's pretty late days on feed is what we would think. However, when you actually break that down and you start to look at when those individual cases occurred, they occurred every day throughout the feeding phase and that 170. Was actually pretty close to the average for the total, length of days on feed for those different groups. Not every group, but as you looked across the board, we saw about the same number of cases occurring every day throughout the feeding phase. You may have a couple questions. One, as I'm describing this data, one being. How did you know it was heart disease? Well, in this particular research study, these cattle were diagnosed with heart disease at necropsy. So we're only talking about mortalities, we're not talking about the ones that we see alive. And they were diagnosed by trained personnel at Necropsy. It wasn't always the same personnel. 'cause we had about, uh, we had multiple feed yards. Uh, two you may be asking. Why does it seem to occur in that pattern over time? And that's one we don't know the answer to, right? We see it at the similar risk over time, which makes us want to leap to. What are some of the potential causes, and I, and I know we're gonna get to that as we talk through today, but I don't have an explanation for very many things that would cause equal risk throughout the feeding phase. If we compare and contrast that, that pattern of disease, or specifically that pattern of death or mortality to things like. Respiratory disease, we see a lot more of our respiratory disease mortality early in the feeding phase. Yes, we have some later, but most of them occur early. If we look at things, uh, other disease syndromes like gastrointestinal disease. We see gastrointestinal disease throughout the feeding phase. So there are some differences, but I would say, and I would be very careful because I've seen people, and I've even seen people report some of the data that we collected and say it's a late day disease because the average is later. Because most of us, when I tell you the average of 170, I suspect your mind formed a little chart that said, okay, it's 170. So that means they're dying between, oh, I don't know, one 50 and one 90. You're, you're, you're bracketing it in there and you're going, well, oh yeah, one 70. So they're dying in there. Or maybe one 40 and 200, I don't know. But, but that is not an accurate depiction of what's actually going on. What we actually see. Is there's about equal risk every day now in this, in that dataset, and we've replicated that in another dataset that actually what it shows is the risk was almost uniform throughout the feeding phase until we started harvesting the cattle. And that's the only time that you saw the risk drop off because the cattle couldn't die of heart disease if they're not there. But you look across the first part of the feeding phase, it's almost a flat line. So the average. Could be just truly the middle point of what we're, what we're seeing, not as with most things. 'cause if, if I told you oh, I had a group of calves and they had an average daily gain of, of 3.9, I. You would assume the calves in that group were centered around 3.9 because it's got a normal distribution. This, these diseases don't have that. So I would be very cautious with talking about timing of disease occurrence, just based on averages. I. Probably a longer answer you wanted. Oh, so ba I I guess I'm not done either on the, when did it occur? So the, when did it occur? Uh, the other groups that we don't have much information on, and I would love to get more information, so we're talking about this in our research specifically feedlot cattle. We don't see, and I'm not aware of, of many reports of anything happening relative to heart disease, this type of heart disease in the pre-weaning phase. Now we have some congenital heart defects that will occur rarely in cattle. That'll happen, but we don't see this congestive heart failure in the pre-weaning phase. I'm not aware of, uh, very many reports or any reports that would show this in the, uh, I'll say old cow, old bull range. So the, we get into that four or 5, 6, 7, we don't see a lot of reports from those populations. There are a few anecdotal reports of cattle bulls and heifers that may have succumbed to heart disease in specific situations, uh, as they go through that yearling phase, which is a little bit, a little bit odd that we would see that in those scenarios. But it also, what seems odd to me is not necessarily the young stock, that doesn't surprise me, uh, but congestive heart failure. We don't see it. In our older animals, especially if it's primarily, and I'll say cardiogenic, so types meaning that if the heart disease is primarily driven by a specific pathology in the heart, that's something starts to go bad and the heart becomes less effective. Then I would expect that .that may be more likely to happen in some of our older animals, just ba and I'm extrapolating there's no data for that. However, if there's something else that's contributing to that process and, and it could well be, uh, we, we know I mentioned pneumonia, uh, challenges with respiratory in younger animals, that could be a contributing factor. So most of what we know about the timing of heart disease is during the feeding phase. I would say there is no specific time that we're seeing as they go through that phase that is, that is necessarily more susceptible than the other based on our research.
Track 1Well, and I'm, I assume that, and you could shed some light on this from your time around diagnostics, labs and things like that, but I would guess that Animals in a feed yard are probably more likely to have a postmortem inspection on them than a cow out on the range environment. And so sometimes it may be happening in those older cows and we don't even know it.
squadcaster-hg65_2_12-21-2023_125804So I had this discussion with the pathologist yesterday and he said the exact same thing. Yeah. So he, he said the exact same thing you did. He said, wow, we don't, we don't do as many cows, right. We do more in the feed yard and And that's a hundred percent correct. In fact, I would say we have seen, as we've been doing this research over the last four or five years. Even in feed yard environments, uh, I can guarantee you won't diagnose heart disease if you don't look at the heart. And so we've had some feed yards that have started paying closer attention and we're seeing a few more heart disease cases. I. Because we started looking not because they're necessarily higher, right? There's no way for me to sort those two out, which I think is an important distinction when we think about, is this increasing. So yes, I think you're right on the mortalities. My counterargument to the pathologist when he said the, that we don't do a lot of necropsies on old cows. True. But in most diseases, heart disease being no different. The mortalities are usually the tip of the iceberg, and the big part of the iceberg is some of those animals that have. Clinical or subclinical disease, meaning yes, we may not necropsy a bunch of them, but I also haven't had calls from people saying, Hey, this cow has heart disease, or, I'm seeing a clinical case before she actually died. Because most of these I would expect you're going to, they're not gonna look normal. This is not just an old cow and she was walking around the pasture and, and then she died. Uh, it is, it is a slow disease process that they're going to start by showing some of the symptoms we see with other diseases. It's gonna lag behind the herd, not gonna be eating as much, not gonna be doing as well, and I would expect. We'd see some increased respiration rate. I would expect that we would probably see something that we may or may not see edema in those. But I would be shocked, even if we're not doing necropsies, that we hadn't seen some clinical cases and say, man, we're seeing this in cows too. And, and if somebody's got different information, I'd be happy to have somebody say, Hey, yeah, let's, here's where we see it. Uh, but we haven't seen it there,
Track 1Some of those may end up if they pull the trigger quick enough and haven't already tried to treat them with antibiotics. Some of 'em may end up being harvested. I don't know if there's any way you could go to cous and, and on the line. Just take random samples and see how many of 'em would exhibit that.
squadcaster-hg65_2_12-21-2023_125804That I think that would be really cool to do. And, and, um, that, and some of our other diseases that we see in other stages of cattle production would love to see what we see in adult cows that have been out on rains their whole life. Right. So, um, but, but it does lead us to thinking about How often we see these things and kind of, kind of your slaughter, uh, plant or harvest facility triggered me to think about what we, what we see in feedlot cattle. So the frequency of this heart disease, and this is, this is one of the areas that, um, makes you wonder how, how big of an issue is this? And I'll, I'll say a couple things. So we saw in some of our research, we would see between four and seven. 10,000 head that arrived at a feed yard would be a heart disease mortality. Between four and seven out of 10,000 if you lump together with those cattle that were removed or railed. Because we thought they were heart disease. That number can jump up to 15 out of 10,000. So 15 out of 10,000 arrivals is one way to think of it. S small number, however, I. Of the percent of dead cattle or of the percent of mortalities, it would be anywhere between around five to 6% of all mortalities. So it's meaningful and it's meaningful because these, some of those heart disease cases, and I mentioned they occur throughout the feeding phase. Mortality relatively early in the feeding phase is not unexpected Mortality, late in the feeding phase is unexpected and impactful, right? So when we get cattle that are close to harvest and we have a mortality in that part, when we thought we were through it, and it's just like any of us, right? When, when you're going through the really hard day and you know you've got a really hard day going up. And, and you're starting to go through that day and it's 10 in the morning, you go, well, I gotta go through the rest of the day. I'm not gonna think about anything else right now. However, if you got done and got home at five o'clock and they called and they said, well, the cows are out, I.
Track 1It's
squadcaster-hg65_2_12-21-2023_125804Oh my goodness. It's totally different, right? Than if they got out at 10:00 AM and you knew it was gonna be a hard day. So that's, that's my analogy for when we see that heart disease late. It's huge. It's important. We wanna do something about it because I already got home, I was getting ready to do something else, and then the cows are out again. So it, it is, uh, it can be impactful. So as I mentioned. about seven mortalities per 10,000 head, about 15 mortalities and rails per 10,000 head, about 5% of the death loss. However, we talked earlier, the tip of the iceberg is mortality, right? So now. Logical question would be if we talked about that earlier, what does the rest of the population looks like in the subclinical or the other clinical cases? And I've got two pieces of information that, that I'll share. One, when we did, uh, necropsies and we did, uh, about, uh. 900 necropsies over the last couple years at different feed yards, multiple feed yards, and we're looking for a variety of things, right? It wasn't focused on heart disease, it was focused on what caused those mortalities. And so we did complete evaluation on all the mortalities and what we found was about 4% of them died from what? What we termed mechanical heart failure and mechanical heart failure. Our definition would be they had an enlarged heart and they had one of these secondary signs I mentioned earlier, some, uh, the congested liver, some fluid, or in other places or edema. So we had about 4% of those that died of mechanical heart failure. However, we had about 25% of the cattle that had some cardiac change. So they had a heart lesion of some sort. They had a bigger heart. If we compare that to, so that's in feedlot mortality. So obviously they had some illness, right? So, uh, could be that mortality went along with that in. Packing plants when people have done, and the Colorado State crew has done some of those. There's a group out of Idaho that has done a fair bit of those, and they will see if we talk about heart scores, there's a scoring system, but they will see abnormal hearts, and it varies based on the study, but you may see abnormal hearts in that 20% range depending on what you, what you term abnormal. So there are probably more abnormal hearts out there. Than we think about with Just,
Track 1Does it
squadcaster-hg65_2_12-21-2023_125804sorry, Matt, I went off on a tangent. That wasn't even a question you asked. I don't
Track 1No, but it was on my list. My next one was, what's the incidence rate? And so you went right through it. Uh, and, and I've got the heart scoring system on down here too, that I was wanting to visit about, um,, between feed yards. Do we see a big difference in certain regions of the country or one feed yard over another? I mean, this is getting into the next question, which is what's causing it?
squadcaster-hg65_2_12-21-2023_125804Yeah. So, we go to what's causing it, well, I could go to that first. I don't know, you probably want a longer answer than that, but that's the quick answer. Uh. For, for the difference in between feed yards? Yes, we see it. So the numbers that I just gave you on the incidence rates are averages and we see quite a bit of variability between feed yards and it is impossible for me to know if that variability is based on how we're looking and how we're diagnosing it or if it's based on differences among yards. I have not. I have not seen other than, uh, in yards at higher elevations, you will see a little bit higher levels. Uh, but I haven't seen anything that would tell me that there's a geographic distribution to this, by region of the country. We looked in some of our data. I mentioned we had data from US and Canada. we saw a a little bit of differences. Between cattle that were in different areas based on the elevation of those yards. But we didn't really have any high elevation yards, I'd say.
Track 1So then let's go on the, the causes. Um, what are some ideas or some thoughts you have? Have we got anything that the industry has come anywhere close to consensus upon? Or, or what are we, what are we dealing with here? I.
squadcaster-hg65_2_12-21-2023_125804so let's, let's, uh. Let's hit some of the theories, right? So there are some theories that are out there, and I'll say that, uh, I don't know that any have necessarily been proven yet, but I, but I think there's some, probably some merit to all of them and we don't have the final answers. So one of the things that's, that's been put out there, and we did some work looking at risk factors, but one of the things that's been put out there is. Cattle size increasing has contributed to this problem. And when I say size, I mean mature size, but I don't even really mean mature size. I mean size. At harvest. When we, when we, after we go through a feeding phase and we know that finish weights. Have increased and hot carcass weights have increased over the last several years as those weights have increased. One of the hypotheses is, is that, uh, is the heart as efficient when we get to some of those different levels, my. Question with that would be, if that was one of our big contributing factors, I would expect much more of our heart disease to occur at the end of the feeding phase than at the beginning or the middle. So as we see heart disease throughout the feeding phase, uh, I don't know that that's, that doesn't explain all of it for sure. Now we do see, when we looked at, we looked at risk factors. Uh, there were a couple risk factors when we went back and evaluated what makes cattle at risk for heart disease. Uh, we did see that there were that steers. Males were a little bit higher risk than heifers. We saw that Cattle at Elevation played a role, and that was a little bit higher. And we can start to think that, that there's potentially some of these things that are cumulative and it may be Seems unlikely that there's a singular cause, but as we start adding things, like you talked about the PAP test earlier, right? We can't do the pap test until we get to an elevation because we have to put a little bit of stressor on the system before we see how it will react. While with heart disease, it may be A cumulative level of stressors on the system. So I mentioned causal wise, we talked about size of cattle. Genetics is one that has been brought up, uh, multiple times, and we do see heart disease in multiple breeds. It is very hard, even from, and I, and I'll tell you, in our necropsy project, when we, when we looked at those and we looked at cattle with heart disease, we did not collect genetic data. That's not our research goal or where we're looking. We did look at, uh. I'll call it breed composition. We looked at coat color right? I mean, we have deceased animals. I don't have a lot, I can tell you about their breed other than to be able to say coat color and what type of cattle they look like. Uh, and we saw it in, we saw it in multiple breeds. We didn't have enough there in that population to actually go back and make any meaningful conclusions. In our, research where we looked at risk factors, we actually saw that, Beef breed cattle or native breed cattle were at less risk for heart disease at high elevation compared to Holstein cattle at high elevation. So there weren't a lot of differences across the board, but two, two take homes there. One. There's probably multiple factors contributing because we have to look at breed and elevation. And two, we also see this in dairy breeds. So it's not, not just in beef breeds, dairy breeds that are, that are on feed. So genetics has been, has been one of the other things that's been broached as a cause. There are some genetic tests out there that I think, um, have. Probably have some merit in thinking about can we identify cattle with heart disease beforehand or with the potential for heart disease. And really, if we could get back to breeding selections, that'd be great. But like most of our genetic traits, uh, it's not gonna be a. An easy find or probably a single trait selection that's going to change the course. So we'll have to see. It's probably, it could be that they have a genetic propensity to it, but then they need to have risk factor X, Y, or Z. So we need to think through that, think through that process. It, it would make sense that there's, um, a genetic component to it as well. Those are a couple of the big causes that have been proposed? No, nobody's really sorted that out. Uh, I'll say the oddity to me and the one that we're still, and, and we're currently investigating some other potential con, I won't call 'em, causes, I'll say contributing factors. Um, looking at what we can find because, uh, as we see those diseases throughout the feeding phase certainly makes us wonder if there's, there's anything else going on.
Track 1mean, I've even had a feed yard manager to think that they can get even more granular in terms of genetics and say, well, we think it's cattle that are out of that are. Outta heifers and that those heifers were bred to a low birth weight bull and they had a shorter gestation. And so you shaved a week or two weeks off of that incubation period and they didn't develop their heart fully. Man. I mean, when we start getting genetic theories from, from buddies of mine that are managing a feed yard, that's like me trying to balance their rations. I, I, I wouldn't be very good at some of the challenges they have, but you know, there's Uh, countless theories out there and especially as we get to talking about different biological types and breeds and, and anytime we look at a beef industry in 2023 and try to say, well, we see more of these out of this sort of breed, especially when, and I'll just say it since I own 'em, since Angus would make up. Somewhere between 70 and 75% of the nation's cow herds today, at least an Angus influenced cow. And the dominant color of black could be coming from various different, uh, breeds out there. That one gets a little bit sticky when we say, yeah, it's, it's just in the black cattle. Well, I guess what the black cattle are 75% of the population that are coming through these fight feed yards. So that, that gets a little bit, gets a little wonky too from a data standpoint.
squadcaster-hg65_2_12-21-2023_125804I just wanna follow up on the genetic 'cause. 'cause you're right, I mean, there could be multiple factors affecting it. Be careful how we, 'cause there's different ways to evaluate genetic associations and me, which is why I was very cautious when I talked about looking at phenotype or coke color and going back to heart disease because I can tell you they were black, or I can tell you they were a different color. That doesn't, that doesn't really tell us whether or not they had genetics of a specific breed in that cattle. So unless we're doing genetic testing. Secondarily, if I do Genetic testing, but then the population that I'm trying to compare them to is basically the same genetics. It's gonna be very hard for me to find anything
Track 1right.
squadcaster-hg65_2_12-21-2023_125804if there is, whether we're talking about, and we could, we could broaden this for, for any other genetic related disease. I think one of the thoughts that, that, uh, someone was telling me and I thought, this is. A pretty profound thought when as we think about genetic diseases going into the future. So we've done a great job selecting, right? We feel like we take take, I talked har carcass weight, but talk marbling, score, right? Talk about some of the quality characteristics of the carcass. And you and I probably have the same memories of the late nineties when people said, man, can we get to this level of, and everybody goes, oh no, we're never gonna get there with, with marbling, or, we're never gonna get there with this type of, I mean, just blows you away what we've done in the last 20 years. Right.
Track 1Right,
squadcaster-hg65_2_12-21-2023_125804Big, huge changes.
Track 1talked about this in the last podcast with Randy Block. Yep.
squadcaster-hg65_2_12-21-2023_125804Hu. Huge changes. Now if we had any, um, I'm gonna call it a s stow away. I'm not a geneticist, but let's say there's a sto away trait, right? If it was a bad trait and say it, it's if there was something like heart disease that made us a little bit more susceptible. If that trait was associated with negative performance, negative carcass, negative, other stuff, we would've selected away from it long ago. And in fact, we probably have inadvertently avoided several issues because we're selecting for performance and we've got it that trait's associated with something else. So it seems like, it's not surprising to me that some of these disease things we have to think about, would they be in high performing cattle? Probably because that's how we're selecting, right? And I don't have a tool to not to select for high performing cattle without X, Y, or Z. And I'm not saying this is genetic linked, I'm not saying for heart disease. But I do think in broad terms, if we think about any of the genetics, because we don't have health genetic selections primarily, right? We don't have for some of our com yet.
Track 1yeah. Yeah.
squadcaster-hg65_2_12-21-2023_125804But that could change things because as much as we've talked about, uh, we don't want a single trait select, but sometimes we end up selecting traits that are all in the same bucket,
Track 1Sure.
squadcaster-hg65_2_12-21-2023_125804That don't have some of our health stuff. So yeah, love to have some health stuff, but right now we don't. Which means anything may have been in inadvertently brought along.
Track 1Yeah. And that. Causation correlation debate. I mean, it's, it's gone on for years, not just in cattle breeding. Um, and I, I think you were spot on. I, we don't find the genetic, conditions in the cattle that don't perform well because we don't have any chance of breeding them back to their.
squadcaster-hg65_2_12-21-2023_125804that's right.
Track 1closely related parents because we don't want what they're giving us. Uh, the ones that we're gonna find are the ones that we, we probably inadvertently select a little too closely, uh, in the pedigree. So let's, let's talk a bit about heart scoring and how those are scored and what's a one and what's a five and, and, and where we go from there in terms of those phenotypes.
squadcaster-hg65_2_12-21-2023_125804Yeah, so all uh. Check your, check your movie reference knowledge here, so you can, you can use the do, do you remember the good, the bad, and the ugly?
Track 1I've, I've
squadcaster-hg65_2_12-21-2023_125804Vaguely. Oh,
Track 1saw it. I'm a terrible, I would miss every, every movie question you ever ask on cattle. Chad, I, I, I just don't spend a lot of time on.
squadcaster-hg65_2_12-21-2023_125804so this is, well this is from the, this is from the seventies, right? Clint Eastwood. So, uh, this, it's the old Western. So, so you have your heart scores, they're one to five. But essentially what we're trying to do is figure out the good, the bad, and the ugly, right? And so the ugly. Is this heart score five, four or five? Uh, it it is. If we think about, uh. What that heart is doing, it's remodeling, and that right side of the heart is not as effective and it's actually getting bigger. So instead of being a nice heart shape and, and everybody can picture a heart shape with the point at the bottom, what you see is those five heart score fives, which is the worst, the ugly will look like a u. Basically it comes down, it's flat across the bottom and goes back up. Or occasionally they'll look like a w it's so flabby on the sides that it indents back up in the middle where it should be pointing down. And it's not because the heart is shrinking, it's because the heart is bigger. So some of those, uh, we've seen hearts in those cattle and, and as I was talking to students, they're doing necropsy. They said, you don't get. A 12 inch heart overnight, right? You slap a ruler next to it and the width of the heart is 12 inches. That doesn't happen overnight. That means we're all of a sudden getting a really big heart over a long period of time. So that would be our heart Score four and heart score five. Uh, heart score ones. what we would say are the good, right? They're nice, they're heart shaped. They look to be and, and yes, heart size will change with the age of the animal and the size of the animal, but the heart shape really shouldn't, and the heart should be fit. Of any muscle in the body, it should be fit throughout life in that it is, it's gotta be pumping, going nonstop. So heart score one is pretty normal shaped heart score two may or may not be. I. Abnormal, right? Depending on who's classifying 'em, what you're calling 'em. They just don't look quite as normal as a one. Uh, heart score three is our middle ground, and this, that's, that's where I might say is the bad. I don't know what those are, right? I don't know exactly. Uh, is that a diseased heart or is it not? It doesn't look normal, but it doesn't look completely diseased. Uh, and those scoring systems, essentially there's the one to five systems out of Colorado State. what I like to know, when we look at our data, we are often looking at diseased or not. In which case, I'll lump together the fours and the fives compared to everybody else, or we'll lump together the ones and the twos compared to everybody else just to make sure that we can figure out. W we truly know they were. 'cause those fours and fives, they're diseased. The ones, they're healthy, the twos, some of them might be healthy, might be transitioning, but I know those fours and fives are diseased. So the, when I alluded to some of that research earlier, that's been done looking at the packing plant or some of our research that we did on Necropsies. we're, we're doing some of those, some of those heart scores, so the heart score itself tells us about the shape of that heart, and then I just said, and, and hopefully as, as people are listening to this, they also heard this, they probably heard, okay, fours and fives. He's pretty sure about ones. He's pretty sure about twos and threes. He was pretty, uh, wishy-washy on. That's an accurate assessment of what I said, which means on some of those cattle, a heart score is nice, but if we're doing a necropsy, if you show me a heart that has a score of three, but also has a bad liver and fluid in the abdomen, that calf had heart disease, right? I mean, so those ancillary signs can be important, in addition to heart disease.
Track 1I guess my question on these cattle that were at altitude and Pap tested, do we have literature that that shows any correlation between those that were poor ping cattle? I never can remember if high or low is good on the PAP testing. I assume high is bad, but those high Pap tested animals, were they then heart scored to see, Hey, is that heart abnormal? Is it a four scoring heart or something?
squadcaster-hg65_2_12-21-2023_125804Uh, I know there was some research like that that was being conducted. I don't know the results of that, so I know they were looking at that and following 'em through, and my understanding, people have tried to look at some of the pap testing in the feed yard environment to see if we can find some of these calves a a little bit sooner. I'm, I'm not aware that that has been helpful. However, I would say I. If we pap based on our numbers, if I pap tested 10,000 head at most, I'd expect to find five or seven that have heart disease. So it, it's really, really hard to show a test like that, uh, with a disease prevalence that's this low.
Track 1So what about any connection as we're scoring these hearts? Are they also looking at lungs and livers and some of the other visceral
squadcaster-hg65_2_12-21-2023_125804That is a great question. So it, it depends on what environment we're scoring them in. So if we're scoring them in the packing facility, there are times that I know of research groups that have looked at hearts and they have looked at lungs. They don't always get a look at 'em at the same time, because we have people on different chains and when it's very hard to asso associate visceral organs back to A calf unless you, unless you can be three places at once. Right. Which sometimes you can do research teams can do that. Uh, there hasn't been, that's one of the areas of interest I'd like to see more research is what does it look like? Because you may be saying, and, and I agree with this, is. Earlier I said that some of our, this is really congestive heart failure, which means our right heart's not working, which could be because the right heart's having a problem, or could be because the lungs are limiting that flow. And pulmonary hypertension is one of the issues. So pulmonary hypertension or that, that pressure in the lungs. With congestion could cause our heart to have problems. Now we know one of the symptoms of that would be without, well, I'll, I'll go a little further down this track. The, uh, interstitial pneumonia. So we talk about interstitial pneumonia in cattle and sometimes
Track 1lot would call a IP, right?
squadcaster-hg65_2_12-21-2023_125804Yeah, and I'll broaden that because, so a lot would call it a IP. So a IP acute interstitial pneumonia would be O one form, but the interstitial pneumonia is different than broncho pneumonia. So broncho pneumonia, uh, is what we see. And we typically think of when, if you've seen lungs or you talk about a calf and he's sick many times we're talking about broncho pneumonia. We're treating him with an antibiotic, and we're concerned that there's bacteria in the lungs. Probably started with the virus, then we got a bacteria. Now we may have abscesses, we may have other things. also the interstitial pneumonia, which acute interstitial pneumonia typically we see a little bit later, although we can see it throughout the feeding phase. But that interstitial pneumonia causes us to have, basically edema or swelling in those lungs, making airflow hard to move. Now with our a IP that you mentioned, the acute interstitial pneumonia, we expect those calves, they, they were pretty normal yesterday. They're very abnormal today with our heart failures. They weren't normal yesterday, right? They may have looked okay, but they weren't normal. Uh, with our a IP, we think they were. However, there's also an interstitial pneumonia that we have seen, uh, that goes along with our broncho pneumonia, right? So we see a broncho pneumonia and you can also see an interstitial component and the. Broncho pneumonia is typically confined to the lower part of the lung, and the interstitial is in the upper part of the lung. Does that contribute to some of our heart remodeling? We don't know the answer to that, but I think that's worth pursuing. So I think part of your question is, uh. Yes, we're doing heart scores and that's great, and that gives us an idea of what's going on. But we really need to better understand the pathology of how that heart fits into the total picture of the animal is, I think, where you were going, and I a hundred percent agree with you.
Track 1Yeah, that's, and it could even somewhat even say from a nutrition standpoint, well backup standpoint. Yeah. Was that calf sick when he was outside? The cow developed Long-term permanent lung damage, and that's actually the causative agent of why the heart is now different than it should have been. Not because he was born with a defective heart, but it was trying to make up for lungs that were damaged and we thought we got him over it and through it, and he only has 30% lung capacity. Some nutritionists, I think would even go to, did we have some kind of nutritional challenge that permanently impacted the liver? And so now everything, blood, gut, health, whatever else may be affected and that has somehow caused other issues in, in other internal organs. So yeah, it's, it's quite often additive, right? Not just one root cause. That's one silver bullet.
squadcaster-hg65_2_12-21-2023_125804Which, which is why I think, um, and, and, and probably not only is it additive, I suspect all of our heart failures that we see don't have the same Cause which means we need to clearly, and I'm gonna go very back to the start of this, where we talked about it and we threw out a bunch of synonyms. Well, we need to figure out are they all the, are they all the same? Are all these cases the same? Are they the same causative factor? How can we describe 'em? And then let's name it and start, uh, eliminating it as best we can.
Track 1So trying to wrap all this up, we're talking about per 10,000 calves coming into the feed yard. This affecting somewhere around five head. And of those that we're losing it being actually 5% of mortality, uh. Even with that low initial number, I think that about anybody in the industry, especially anyone who's lost one of these in the feed yard, regardless of the time, but especially as a big animal about ready for harvest, um, says that it's important. So what can we do? What do we do from here forth?
squadcaster-hg65_2_12-21-2023_125804Yeah, I think that's a great question. And, and the best way I, and this is coming from a researcher's perspective, right, is that we've, we've gotta be able to get a good handle on, uh, we've got a good handle on frequency, but let's get a good handle on exactly. What each of those cases represents. So what we were just talking about, I think one of the next steps we have to do is make sure that all of these are the same, and make sure that we've got a holistic approach to evaluating not just the heart, not just that it's a heart disease dead, but how many of these are heart disease? Plus pneumonia. Uh, how many of our pneumonias potentially led to heart disease or heart disease potentially led to pneumonia. I don't know which way that arrow runs, but we need to have good documentation on that part of the process. And I think continued research in this, in this area makes a lot of sense.
Track 1Yep. Well, I know that, um, you are working with several different groups, um, one being the American Angus Association that's wanting to find out more. And I think that that, um, to me speaks well of a breed that, yeah, does represent a lot of the cattle that are out there in the feed yards. But if there is talk about this being a breed or a line or lines within a breed, they, and we as, as members want to know about it. and also just putting your industry hat on. You're not serving us if we're not asking those hard questions, even if it's, even if there are answers that we really don't, feel very comfortable about, we have to, to address it. And I think that's important. And I think that's, that proactive mindset is, is really good. And yes, we. We probably know just enough to be dangerous right now, but as long as we keep asking the questions and digging a little deeper, hopefully we'll, we'll know enough that we can, um, make the right decisions, whether it be from a management standpoint, genetics standpoint, whatever the case may be going forth. Anything else to to add on on this whole topic?
squadcaster-hg65_2_12-21-2023_125804Nope. I have really enjoyed visiting with you. This has been, this has been a great hour and, and I think this is, a good example of where, just like you said, you have to have different facets to really try to solve the problem. University, industry, um, private companies, anybody else that's part of the process. How do we get our hands around a new problem? And that's, that's been an exciting opportunity to try to make things better.
Track 1Good. Well, we appreciate your work on this and, and others as well. 'cause there have been a lot of folks, like you said, that you've leaned on for their research and, and answers and, uh, long as we keep collaborating, I think that, uh, hopefully like so many other challenges before we can make some real progress and figure out a potential solution.
squadcaster-hg65_2_12-21-2023_125804Yeah, absolutely. And most of the research that, well, all the research that I shared. Has been a collaborative effort. So we've got some good folks that we work with here at the, at the university I mentioned we've got some pathologists, we've got some epidemiologists. We had a grad student, Blaine Johnson, who's now in Texas, uh, who did a lot of this stuff. So we, we've had the, that's the nice thing is we can put together a team with lots of different expertise areas to address problems just like this.
Track 1Great. Great. Well keep up the good work. We appreciate all that you do and we'll continue to to look to the Beef Cattle Institute for more answers and some practical information and applications, and look forward to visiting again soon.
squadcaster-hg65_2_12-21-2023_125804Excellent. Thanks Matt.
Track 1You bet. Thank you, Brad.
Microphone (Yeti Stereo Microphone)-1Thanks again for joining us for practically ranching brought to you by Dale banks Angus. Again, we thank you for being a loyal listener. be sure you like, and follow the show. We just hit a milestone of over 50,000 downloads and the podcast continues to grow. So tell a friend about us. We appreciate your time here and hope that you're enjoying this. We wish the best to you. Stay warm out there. As calving spring calving season is started, uh, take care of yourselves, take care of the cattle and thanks again for listening to practically ranching.
