Johannesburg - Dogs age in dog years, seven years to that of every human’s - or that is what everybody thought.
A one year old puppy times seven is the equivalent of a child in grade school. That 11-year-old dog is like a 77-year-old senior citizen.
But there is a problem with aging humankind’s best friend through dog years.
Experts are discovering that it is more complicated than that.
An organisation called the Dog Aging Project (DAP) has been tackling the question of canine longevity and over the last three years studied tens of thousands of dogs of all sizes, breeds and backgrounds.
What the researchers hope to do is find the secrets to not only dog ageing but also in how their owners get old too.
One of the goals is for the open source dataset to be available to veterinarians and scientists who will be able to assess how well a particular dog is aging.
Now as part of a new study the DAP will be examining 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 broader scientific community,” said Joshua Akey, a professor at 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.”
So far more than 32,000 dogs have joined what has been nicknamed the DAP Pack.
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, which is planned to last ten years.
Some of these owners will be asked to collect cheek swabs from their pets, for DNA study. Other DAP Pack members will be selected to submit fur, faecal, urine and blood samples. This will be done by veterinarians.
The researchers hope that they will be able to identify specific biomarkers of canine aging. This will, they believe, have a spin off in understanding human ageing. The reason for this is that dogs share many of the aging traits of humans. Veterinary care has parallels to human healthcare and dogs share their owners' lived environments which has an effect on aging.
“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, in a statement. He is the principal investigator for the National Institute on Aging grant that funds the project.
Besides aging, the scientists also hope that DNA analysis will help in understanding the evolutionary history and domestication of dogs.
The researchers plan to look at 300 of the oldest dogs in the pack to work out what is the secret of 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.
So just how best is it to work out the age of our four legged friend?
While a lot of work still needs to be done to unlock the secrets of dog aging, rule of thumb according to the researchers is that big dogs age faster, perhaps ten times faster than a human. Small dogs however live longer at five times that of a human.