Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 September 2010
The metabolic profile test was designed as a diagnostic aid to show the presence or absence of ‘abnormal’ blood chemistry in dairy herds. The idea was not new. Blood chemistry had been used for many years to assess the metabolic status of individuals and groups of animals but a comparatively recent trend had been to link a number of these analyses together into a single package or multiphasic screening system. Parallel advances in this direction have been made in both human and veterinary fields and progress has been helped by the development of auto-analysers which can carry out several analyses simultaneously at relatively low cost.