Thymus and meat physicochemical measurements to discriminate calves treated with anabolic and therapeutic doses of dexamethasone

To preserve the Europe consumers’ health, the use of glucocorticoids as growth promoters is prohibited in cattle fattening. In 2008, the Italian Ministry of Health associated to the official control a national monitoring plan based on the histological thymus analysis to identify animals illegally treated with corticosteroids. However, since corticosteroids are authorized and widely used for therapeutic purposes, it is necessary to verify whether the thymus histological test and some physicochemical traits in meat are able to discriminate doped calves from dexamethasone therapeutic treated ones. The aims of this study were (i) to establish whether the therapeutic and illicit corticosteroid treatments of calves could be differentiated through histological evaluation of thymus and by physicochemical meat traits; (ii) to identify a restricted number of physicochemical traits that could differentiate dexamethasone treated from untreated calves. Three groups of 15 calves each were included in this study: group dexamethasone therapeutic treatment treated with dexamethasone 21-phosphate disodium salt at a therapeutic dose (2 mg/kg of live weight for three consecutive days); group dexamethasone anabolic treatment orally treated with dexamethasone 21-phosphate disodium salt according to a presumed anabolic protocol (0.4 mg/day per animal for 20 days); group placebo control treated with a placebo served as control. Results demonstrated that groups could be easily discriminated by thymus microscopy as well as by two meat markers, namely, cooking loss and shear firmness or Warner-Bratzler shear force. The combination of thymus microscopic features and meat physicochemical traits could be used as a practical, economic and accurate screening strategy to discriminate between meat from illegally and therapeutically treated calves. This new reliable and simple tool could contribute to identify animals treated with dexamethasone in those countries where glucocorticoids are illegally used as growth promoters. More in general, this system could be included in the framework of official controls, and applied to verify suppliers’ reliability by the meat industry.