How old is your dog in human years? And what factors contribute to a long and healthy life for a dog?
By Liz Fuller-Wright, Office of Communications, Princeton University
February 2, 2022 -- For years, it’s been
generally accepted that “dog years” are roughly human years times seven – that
a 1-year-old puppy is like a 7-year-old child, and an 11-year-old elderly dog
is like a 77-year-old senior citizen. But it’s actually much more complicated,
say experts.
Part of the problem is that while humans
have clear metrics for healthy aging, little is known about “normal aging” for
our four-legged friends. Big dogs tend to age the fastest — maybe 10 times
faster than humans — while little breeds may live to be 20 years old, with “dog
years” about five times human years.
The Dog Aging Project, founded in
2018, is by far the most ambitious project tackling the question of canine
longevity, enrolling and studying tens of thousands of dogs of all sizes,
breeds and backgrounds to develop a thorough understanding of canine aging.
Their open-source dataset will give veterinarians and scientists the tools to
assess how well a specific dog is aging and will set the stage for further
research into healthy aging — in both dogs and people.
The researchers detailed their project
and its potential implications for both human and veterinary medicine in
an article published
in the current issue of the journal Nature. One of its most intriguing avenues
of inquiry will analyze the DNA of exceptionally long-lived dogs, the
“super-centenarians” of the dog world.
“This is a very large, ambitious, wildly
interdisciplinary project that has the potential to be a powerful resource for
the broader scientific community,” said Joshua Akey, a
professor in Princeton’s Lewis-Sigler
Institute for Integrative Genomics and a member of the Dog Aging
Project’s research team. “Personally, I find this project exciting because I
think it will improve dog, 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, co-leads the
genetics analyses with Elinor Karlsson at the Broad Institute.
“We are sequencing the genomes of 10,000
dogs,” Akey said. “This will be one of the largest genetics datasets ever
produced for dogs, and it will be a powerful resource not only to understand
the role of genetics in aging, but also to answer more fundamental questions
about the evolutionary history and domestication of dogs.”
The Dog Aging Project (DAP) expects to
run for at least 10 years. To date, more than 32,000 dogs have joined the “DAP
Pack,” as the researchers call their canine citizen scientists.
“We are still recruiting dogs of all
ages, all breeds — purebred or mixed breeds, all sizes, all across the United
States,” said William
Thistlethwaite, a graduate student who works with Akey in the
Lewis-Sigler Institute. “Especially puppies and young dogs up to 3 years old.”
When a dog joins the Pack, their owners
agree to fill out annual surveys and take measurements of their dogs for the
duration of the project; some may be asked to collect cheek swabs for DNA sampling.
In addition, the DAP team works with veterinarians across the country who
assist by submitting fur, fecal, urine and blood samples of select Pack
members.
The researchers hope to identify
specific biomarkers of canine aging. They anticipate that their findings will
translate to human aging, for several reasons: Dogs experience nearly every
functional decline and disease of aging that people do; the extent of
veterinary care parallels human healthcare in many ways; and our dogs share our
lived environments, a major determinant of aging and one that cannot be
replicated in any lab setting.
“Given that dogs share the human
environment and have a sophisticated health care system but are much
shorter-lived than people, they offer a unique opportunity to identify the
genetic, environmental and lifestyle factors associated with healthy lifespan,”
said Dr. Daniel Promislow, the principal investigator for the National
Institute on Aging grant that funds 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.
In particular, the researchers want to
look at 300 oldest dogs in the Pack to see if they can identify the keys to
their longevity. “One part of the project that I am super excited about is a
‘super-centenarian’ study, comparing the DNA of exceptionally long-lived dogs
to dogs that live to the average age for their breed,” said Akey, the Princeton
geneticist. “This is the first study of its kind in dogs (to my knowledge), and
I think it’s a clever way of trying to find genetic differences that contribute
to exceptional longevity.”
Within a few months, the team plans to
open their enormous dataset — fully anonymized — to share with scientists
around the world. Researchers from many different fields will have the
opportunity to contribute to the study in countless different ways, based on
their interests.
“It is an honor to share our work with
the scientific community,” said Kate Creevy, lead author on the paper and DAP’s
chief veterinary officer. “The Dog Aging Project is creating a resource with
the power to transform veterinary medicine, aging research, and many scientific
and non-scientific fields of inquiry.”
For more information, or to learn how to
enroll your dog in the ongoing project, visit https://dogagingproject.org.
https://www.princeton.edu/news/2022/02/02/what-your-dogs-lifespan-you-might-be-surprised
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