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ICDS co-hire contributes to study finding new treatment for dairy cows

Editor’s Note: A version of this article was originally published on Penn State News.

Justin Silverman, Penn State Institute for Computational and Data Sciences co-hire and assistant professor of statistics and of medicine, is one of the many authors on a paper that published findings showing that a concentrated sugar solution could be as effective as antibiotics at treating common infection in dairy cows.

This discovery, which was recently published in the journal Frontiers in Veterinary Science, has the potential to reduce reliance on antibiotics and help combat the growing threat of antimicrobial resistance in both humans and animals, according to a Penn State News article.

Adrian Barragan, co-lead author and associate research professor and extension veterinarian at Penn State, said that the findings are significant for the organic dairy industry where antibiotic use is restricted. The results could also pave the way for future studies in humans on the use of sugar-based formulas for uterine infections such as endometriosis.

The study compared two treatments for clinical metritis, a common uterine infection, that can lead to serious health problems in dairy cows. The condition is typically treated with systemic antibiotics such as ceftiofur, which are effective in treating the condition, but may contribute to the growing animal antimicrobial resistance in food-producing animals, the article said.

The researchers focused on using intrauterine dextrose as a possible alternative treatment. Dextrose, a sugar solution, has been studied in both animal and human clinical research. The team investigated the effectiveness of dextrose by enrolling 77 cows diagnosed with clinical metritis and randomly assigning them to one of the two treatment groups: intrauterine dextrose or systemic ceftiofur. The cows’ recovery was monitored and the researchers analyzed the cows’ uterine microbial communities using advanced DNA sequencing to better understand the overall health of their microbiomes.

Their findings suggested that both treatments had similar clinical cure rates, meaning dextrose could potentially be just as effective as antibiotics in treating mild metritis cases. The analysis of the cows’ microbiomes notes that dextrose does not significantly disrupt the bacterial balance in the reproductive tract, unlike antibiotics, according to co-lead author and assistant professor of food animal microbiomes Erika Ganda.

The other Penn State authors on the paper are Silverman; Jennine Lection, who earned a doctoral degree from Penn State and is currently an assistant professor at North Carolina State University; Emily Van Syoc, postdoctoral scholar; Asha Miles, former postdoctoral research associate who is currently a research geneticist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA); Julia Hamilton, undergraduate student; and Marcela Martinez, research technologist. Santiago Bas of the Germany-based feed company Phytobiotics Futterzusatzstoffe GmbH also contributed to the paper.

The study was funded by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture and Hatch Appropriations, the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, and the National Institutes of Health.

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