Princeton Project Challenges the Concept of “Dog Years”

An ambitious project out of Princeton University is challenging the old adage that one human year is roughly equivalent to seven years for our canine companions, and participants say the work could uncover insights into aging that have human health implications.  Dubbed the Dog Aging Project (DAP), tens of thousands of pooches of varying sizes, breeds and backgrounds have already been enrolled.

“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 pet parent to 5-year-old rescue named Abby and a 1-year-old purebred lab named Zoey. “Personally, I find this project exciting because I think it will improve dog, and ultimately, human health.”

To date, 32,000 dogs have joined the DAP Pack—the term researchers use for their canine citizen scientists. 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. One of their most intriguing avenues of inquiry will analyze the DNA of exceptionally long-lived dogs, the “super-centenarians” of the dog world.

The researchers hope to identify specific biomarkers of canine aging. They anticipate that their findings will translate to human aging. 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 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,” says 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.

The researchers detail their project and its potential implications for both human and veterinary medicine in an article published recently in Nature.