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Every dog parent in the world wishes they could spend more time with their baby. Scientists have wondered for years whether such a concept is possible. Can we make our dogs live longer?
For now, everything is still in the preliminary research phase, but there are promising areas of study. Not only have scientists learned a lot about aging in dogs, but they’ve also learned a bit more about human health and aging.
“The Aging Dog Project”
The Dog Aging Project is co-edited by Matt Kaeberlein, who studies aging at the University of Washington in Seattle. In addition to learning how dogs age, Kaeberlein explained, project researchers hope to find ways to slow the aging process.
“I was like, man, I’d love it if I could slow down my dog’s aging,” Kaeberlein recalled as his “light bulb” moment 10 years ago.
About 40,000 people with dogs enrolled in the Dog Aging Project study. These participants provide their dog’s medical history and also complete detailed questionnaires each year (takes about three hours).
RELATED: Scientists Need 10,000 Dogs to Help Study Canine Aging
A subset of around 8,500 of these dogs will have their genome sequenced, and many will also have their hair, blood and urine studied.
Ultimately, the goal here is to find biological clues that could help researchers identify dogs at risk of developing certain diseases as they age. From there, scientists can work on drugs to prevent or treat these diseases.
Kate Creevy, chief veterinarian of the Dog Aging Project, explained:
“We hope to know what types of diets, what types of exercise regimes and what types of breeding are associated with better long-term outcomes so that we can do things that help them have a better quality of life in their last years.”
The Dog Aging Project is also working to determine what aspects of a dog’s lifestyle could help extend its “lifespan” (i.e. the number of years lived in good health, not just more years).
The Dog Aging Project plans to test a few potential anti-aging drugs. One such drug is called rapamycin, which has already been tested in flies, worms and mice. It is to be explored as an anti-aging drug because rapamycin can mimic the effects of calorie restriction, which studies show helps extend life in several species.
“I’m confident that some of the interventions that we know extend lifespan and lifespan in mice will work in dogs,” Kaeberlein said. “It’s really just a matter of showing it through clinical trials.”
So far, the Dog Aging Project has only conducted a few small safety trials. The drug appears to be safe according to a six-month study (as yet unpublished) involving 17 dogs.
Their research is ongoing, and I’m sure you’ll agree with me that this is important work!
‘Vaika’ and DNA studies
Andrei Gudkov, Katerina Adrianova and Daria Fleyshman founded Hard, another project studying aging (dogs and humans). Their research focuses on dogs that have retired from sled racing.
These researchers have spent approximately the past four years caring for and monitoring dogs between the ages of 8 and 11 for the rest of their lives. The retired sled dogs all came from kennels in the northern states of the United States and Canada.
Vaika’s studies focus primarily on DNA damage that accumulates as the dog ages. This DNA damage can send signals to the immune system to destroy affected cells, thereby damaging tissue.
According to Gudkov, professor of oncology at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo, New York, some of this DNA damage is caused by the “retrobiome”. The retrobiome refers to fragments of ancient viruses that have been incorporated into the DNA of animals (and humans) over millions of years of evolution. In other words, the retrobiome may be responsible for age-related decline in dogs and humans.
Working with this theory, Vaika is testing an experimental anti-aging drug intended to stifle retrobiome activity in dogs. Half of the dogs in the trial will receive this drug and the other dogs will take a placebo. Researchers will monitor all of these dogs for signs of aging.
Hopefully these studies will provide Vaika with useful information on longevity.
“Faithful” and epigenetic markers
Created by Celine Halioua Loyal, a biotech startup, to “explicitly develop drugs to increase lifespan and health span.” Loyal’s studies relate somewhat to the two areas of interest of the two previous projects. They are looking for biological clues indicating faster aging.
In addition to studying blood, saliva and urine samples, the Loyal team will examine “epigenetic markers”, which are chemical groups that attach to DNA and control gene protein production. Since these epigenetic markers change over the lifetime of an animal or person, scientists have used this information to determine an organism’s biological age.
And of course, Loyal also conducts clinical drug trials. Details aren’t disclosed, but one drug will target larger dogs (which tend to have shorter lifespans) and the other works similarly to the rapamycin that The Dog Aging Project is testing.
What we can learn from dogs about people
One thing seems pretty obvious in all of this: dogs actually make an excellent model for studying human health. Like Elaine Ostrander of The National Institute for Human Genome Research at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, states:
“They eat our food, they walk on our lawns with pesticides, they drink everything in our water.”
There are obvious differences between humans and dogs, but we also share many biological similarities.
“It seems that at the level of individual age-related diseases, it’s very, very similar,” said Kaeberlein of The Dog Agin Project.
Not to mention: because there is an incredible diversity of dog breeds, and the development of these breeds essentially involved the selection of genes, it is easier to study genetics in different types of dogs than in humans. Finding genes linked to certain diseases in dogs can help scientists develop targeted therapies.
“We don’t have a way to do this very efficiently in humans,” Ostrander notes.
Yes, it’s completely heartbreaking that our dogs’ lives are so relatively short. On the other hand, researchers can study the effects of potential anti-aging drugs over a dog’s lifetime, whereas this would be much more difficult to do in humans.
According Gudkov:
“Studying this in humans is… very impractical, because usually your own life isn’t long enough to see the fruits of your labor. A dog’s life is sufficiently shorter than a human life, and allows us to experiment reasonably and see the results.
RELATED: 12 Signs Of Aging Every Dog Owner Should Look For
If this all sounds a little confusing, that’s because it is! While many theories and data support this research, we obviously don’t have any concrete answers as to why our dogs are aging so rapidly or how we can slow it down at this time.
The MIT Technology Review covered this search in more detail if you want to know more. In the meantime, when you look at your senior dog and wish he would stop aging, think of all this promising research!
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