How old is your dog in human years? And which factors contribute to a long and healthy life of a dog? For years, it was commonly believed that “dog years” is roughly human years times seven — which is a 1-year-old puppy is like a 7-year-old child, and an 11-year-old senior dog is like a 77-year-old senior. But it's actually much more complicated, experts say.
Part of the problem is that while humans have clear stats for healthy aging, little is known about "normal aging" for our four-legged friends. Large dogs usually age the fastest – perhaps 10 times faster than humans – while small breeds can live to be 20 years old, with 'dog years' about five times human years.
Founded in 2018, the Dog Aging Project is by far the most ambitious project addressing the issue of canine longevity, enrolling and studying tens of thousands of dogs of all shapes and sizes, breeds and backgrounds to gain an in-depth understanding of aging. become of dogs to develop. Their open-source dataset gives veterinarians and scientists the tools to assess how well a specific dog is aging and will pave the way for further research into healthy aging – both in dogs and humans.
The researchers detailed their project and its potential implications for both human and veterinary medicine in a paper published in the current issue of the journal Nature. One of their most intriguing research methods is analyzing the DNA of exceptionally long-lived dogs, the 'super centenarians' of the canine world.
“This is a very large, ambitious, wildly interdisciplinary project that has the potential to be a powerful resource for the wider scientific community,” said Joshua Akey, a professor in Princeton's Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics and a member of the Dog Aging Project. “Personally, I find this project exciting because I believe it will improve dog health and ultimately human health.”
Akey, a dog lover with a 5-year-old rescue dog named Abby and a 1-year-old purebred Lab named Zoey, leads the genetic analysis along with Elinor Karlsson of the Broad Institute.
"We're sequencing the genome of 10,000 dogs," Akey said. “This will be one of the largest genetic datasets ever produced for dogs, and it will be a powerful resource not only for understanding the role of genetics in aging, but also for answering more fundamental questions about the evolutionary history and domestication of dogs.” to answer dogs.”
The researchers hope to identify specific biomarkers of canine aging. They expect their findings will translate to aging in humans for several reasons:Dogs experience nearly every functional decline and age-related illness that humans experience; the scope of veterinary care parallels in many ways human health care; and our dogs share our living environment, a major determinant of aging and one that cannot be replicated in any laboratory setting.
“Since dogs share the human environment and have an advanced health care system, but have much shorter lifespans than humans, they offer a unique opportunity to identify the genetic, environmental and lifestyle factors associated with a healthy longevity,” said Dr. Daniel Promislow, the principal investigator for the National Institute on Aging grant funding the project and a professor of biology at the University of Washington (UW) College of Arts and Sciences and of laboratory medicine and pathology at the UW School of Medicine.
Specifically, the researchers want to look at the 300 oldest dogs in the pack to see if they can identify the keys to their longevity. “Part of the project that I'm super excited about is a 'super centennial' study comparing the DNA of exceptionally long-lived dogs to dogs that are the average age for their breed,” said Akey, Princeton's geneticist. . “This is the first study of its kind in dogs (to my knowledge), and I think it's a smart way to find genetic differences that contribute to exceptional longevity.”
In a few months, the team plans to open their massive dataset — completely anonymized — to share with scientists around the world. Researchers from many different fields have the opportunity to contribute to research in countless different ways, based on their interests.
