Ultrasonographic measures of body fatness and their relationship with plasma levels and adipose tissue expression of four adipokines in Welsh pony mares
Introduction
Obesity in the mare is responsible for various metabolic dysregulations that alter fertility and induce different pathologies [1]. Often included in what is called the equine metabolic syndrome (a cluster of clinical abnormalities whose key feature is insulin insensitivity resulting from hypersecretion of cortisol in adipose tissue, in absence of pituitary involvement), these pathologies are very diverse, ranging from problems affecting locomotion such as laminitis [2] to much more serious metabolic disorders such as insulin dysregulation [3] or the impairment of energy metabolism in the entire organism [4]. In our Welsh pony herd, we are constantly looking for the healthy body habitus for our animals. Our lush pastures are very different from the environment in which the Welsh breed was developed, causing our animals to become obese over successive years, which leads to various pathologies related to overweight condition such as lameness and frequent reproductive problems, making them a good model to study these pathologies.
Apart from body weight (BW), there is a lack of objective and reliable in-field methods for assessing body fatness in equidae. To have reliable fatness indicators, we were first interested in ultrasound measurements by transposing some of the indicators that had already been validated in cattle such as backfat thickness [5]. Moreover, recent works have shown that ultrasound is an interesting approach for monitoring subcutaneous fat deposits in ponies [6], [7]. In parallel, we have been interested in the cytokines of white adipose tissue and focused on leptin [8], [9], [10], [11], adiponectin [9], [10], [11], [12], [13], resistin [9], [14], [15], and visfatin [16], which have been largely studied in plasma and adipose tissue of cattle [17]. These adipokines are not specific to cattle as they are expressed in other domestic animals including chicken [18] and rodents, in which species they have important regulatory functions and in which plasma concentrations or adipose tissue expression changes when energy balance is increased or decreased [13], [14], [16], [19].
Recent reports have shown that the assessment of adipokines provides important information on the growth kinetics of adipose tissue [20], [21]. The objective of this work was first to generate two different extreme states and validate a reliable method for the evaluation of body fatness in Welsh pony mares and second to associate these measures of fatness with metabolic changes including adipokine expression in both plasma and white adipose tissue that occur during summer and early autumn. We assume here that simple and easily achievable ultrasound measurements in the field could replace the use of subjective evaluation methods, and we propose to verify to what extent ultrasound measurements are correlated with physiometabolic parameters.
Section snippets
Animals and experimental design
Experimentation was conducted on 20 Welsh pony mares in accordance with the French National Guidelines for the care and use of animals for research purposes and after approval of the local ethics committee (C2EA 19—Comité d’éthique en experimentation animale Val de Loire—authorization number 2015032309182840–APAFiS#363). Mares aged from 5 to 17 yr (mean age ± SEM = 12.4 ± 3.5). They were housed in boxes during the winter with a natural photoperiod. They were fed twice a day with straw (3.3 kg
Morphological parameters
There was a trend for an increase of BW across the study period, mean BW increasing from 295.0 ± 61.1 kg (mean ± SEM) in April before mares had access to grasslands to 351.0 ± 70.4 kg in October before mares had been rehoused, although this increase was not statistically significant (P = 0.0940). Thoracic perimeter increased significantly from 153.9 ± 10.6 cm in April to 171.1 ± 10.8 cm in October (P = 0.0002), whereas BCS increased from 3.0 ± 0.9 to 4.6 ± 0.6 (P < 0.0001) during the same
Discussion
The abundance of our grasslands, which does not correspond to the scarce environment in which the Welsh breed was developed, leads to the fact that a high proportion of our mares (at least half of them reached a BCS of 5/5) become obese every season. We have demonstrated an average increase in mares' weight between April and October, but this increase in weight was not significant because of the high heterogeneity of the animal population studied. Despite this interindividual variation, the
CRediT authorship contribution statement
C. Staub: Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Formal analysis, Methodology, Investigation, Writing - review & editing. E. Venturi: Project administration, Methodology, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation. M. Cirot: Methodology, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation. L. Léonard: Methodology, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation. P. Barrière: Methodology, Investigation. T. Blard: Methodology, Investigation. Y. Gaudé: Methodology, Investigation. T. Gascogne:
Acknowledgments
The authors thank J-P. Dubois, C. Moussu, F. Elleboudt, G. Gomot, and all the staff of CIRE (INRA, Centre d’imagerie pour la recherche et l’enseignement, Nouzilly, F37380, France) for preparing the mare for CT scanning, Francois Laperruque and Edmond Ricard (INRA UMR1388 GenPhySE, Castanet-Tolosan, France) for developing the SIDEx (Système d’Information des Données d’Expérimentation) application and its informatics link with the TEO-A weighing device, and Flavie Derouin-Tochon and Auréline
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