Helping Dogs and Their Pawrents Live Healthier, Longer
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This message comes from Capital One. Access comprehensive solutions from a top commercial bank that prioritizes your needs today and goals for tomorrow. Learn more at CapitalOne.com slash commercial. Member FDIC. You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. In the United States, we count how many humans live in our country. We also know how much livestock like cows, chickens and pigs are here. And we even have estimates for wildlife populations like birds and bears.

But for pets, not so much. We have no idea how many dogs live in the United States. That's Audrey Ruppel, a veterinarian and data analyst at Virginia Tech. She says that not knowing how many dogs there are means we have a huge knowledge gap on health and disease trends and even how long dogs live.

She's trying to change that. The goal of the Dog Aging Project is to help us understand what really makes a healthy lifespan for our dogs. And for Audrey, health and lifespan, they're really two different things that both need care and attention, even if it's easy to take that first word, health, for granted. I

I think that for all of us, when we talk about wanting our dogs to live a long lifespan, what we really mean is we want our dogs to live a long, healthy lifespan. And I think that we don't often differentiate between those things. But with the Dog Aging Project, she and other researchers can start to.

by collecting lots of health and aging info from dogs all over the country, which started as a lofty goal. Initially, the project felt like a pipe dream. We had a goal of getting to 10,000 dogs and we were concerned it would take us too long to do that. Concerned because they launched the project at the end of 2019. Right into the beginning of a global pandemic.

Which turned out to be a time when a lot of folks were at home with their dogs, with less to do. So... We got to 30,000 dogs in just a few months, and we're now at over 50,000 dogs enrolled in the project. Audrey says this ongoing project will help researchers better understand what makes a dog live a healthy long life.

and also what that says about the health of their human companions. Because of this really co-evolved experience where we both have similar genetics, but we also have the same environments, dogs are actually a perfect species for us to study in order to really understand what happens for humans in terms of the environmental exposures and also how our genes predispose us to health and disease.

Today on the show, quality of life. What researchers have learned so far from the dog aging project, how this could inform human health. Plus, could a pill one day increase dogs' lifespans? I'm Regina Barber. You're listening to Shorewave, the science podcast from NPR. ♪

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So, Audrey, for the Dog Aging Project, your team gets owners to fill out surveys of their dog's health, their lifestyle, like where they're living, what they're exposed to, stuff like that. And you've been doing this for five years now. What have you learned so far? Oh, gosh, we've learned a lot. One thing that we've learned is that our dog population in the Dog Aging Project mimics what we think is the true population of dogs in the U.S. So about 50% of the dogs are purebred and 50% of the dogs are mixed breed dogs.

We have dogs of all ages, shapes, and sizes. And we've learned lots of things about them. About 85% of the dogs in our study are being fed a commercially prepared kibble diet. But there's a lot of diversity in terms of the 15% of dogs that are eating other things. And so those are home-prepared diets, fresh frozen diets, freeze-dried diets, like all kinds of different things. Wow.

We've also learned that dog owners are really good at reporting the breed of their dog, whether it's a single breed or mixed breed dog. They're able to identify that pretty accurately. How do you know? Do you quality check that? Like, how do you know? We did genomic testing on about 1,000 of the dogs in the Dog Aging Project. Wow.

And we asked owners what dog breed they thought that they had. And dog owners were really, really close, even with mixed breed dogs that had been adopted from shelter type situations. They were pretty close with like what the mix was? Pretty close. Wow. Well, it kind of makes sense because our dog breeds were really created by humans. And we created those breeds based on what dogs looked like. We wanted tall dogs or skinny dogs or long dogs. Right.

And so because of that, we ended up with a pretty succinct way of identifying dogs based upon what they look like. That's fascinating. And cat owners, they're like, my cat is orange. Yes. It's not the same. It's actually a real difficulty. Because we didn't breed cats to be a certain way. I don't think cats would allow that kind of behavior, whereas dogs seem to be more amenable. Right.

So one question I've also thought about, like, again, not a dog owner, but I used to use the dog analogy for talking about stars. So small stars actually live a really long time and large stars live a shorter life. And I'd be like, like dogs.

We don't actually know why that is true, right? I thought we did, but is that true? We don't really know why larger dogs live shorter lives than smaller dogs? That is correct. We still do not know why that happens, but we do know that that is an anomaly. When you think about mammals, it is typically the larger the mammal, the larger their lifespan. So like an elephant would live a longer lifespan than would a cat.

But with dogs, it's the exact opposite. And it's just, as you said, the bigger they are, the shorter their lifespan. Wow. We don't have any clue? We do have some ideas and we do think that it might be related to things like, you know, growth hormone and those types of things. And there's some, there's obviously a genetic component to that.

But no, we haven't identified like the gene that is responsible for why that happens. Fascinating. Okay. So what are you trying to answer with this like large data set? Like what are the info gaps you're trying to fill in? Well, I think that the reality is we don't know what we don't know.

And one of the things that we think that we know about dogs are things like breed predispositions. Like we think that we understand which breeds are more prone to get certain diseases as compared to other breeds of dogs. But all of that knowledge has been based on those data sources that are flawed for lots of different ways. Wow. And so it's really hard to know things like, for instance, about breeds that are not very common. Right.

Those types of dogs, we would need to have large populations of them in order to get information about them. And so until we do these large population-based studies, there's a lot of breeds of dogs that would just be, they would fall through the cracks. There are certainly things that I do think that we know with some high degree of certainty. We have done genomic studies in dogs where we've been able to find like precursors, genetic precursors to disease,

And we've done large epi studies where we've actually been able to find some environmental threats that we think can lead to disease outcomes in dogs.

But we've never had a population as large and diverse as the one that we have in the Dog Aging Project. So this is really an opportunity for us to kind of, you know, pull the lid off of a lot of these questions that we haven't been able to answer previously. So part of the Dog Aging Project, I've learned, is that you're repurposing a human drug for dogs. Like, what is this pill? And like, what are you looking at?

Yes. So it is typically used for immune suppression, but at a lower dose, which is a much lower dose, obviously, that we're using in testing in dog populations, we're actually trying to see if it can actually slow aging at a cellular level. So the pill that we're talking about is called rapamycin, and it actually knocks out a pathway called the mTOR pathway. So it truly impacts the body at a cellular level. Okay.

And the question is, if we knock out this pathway, which is associated with aging, can we slow aging in a way that actually increases health span? So it's not that we're trying to create a longer lifespan. It's that we're trying to create better health outcomes.

while dogs are still alive. So looking at things like cardiac output and saying, do their hearts function better? Are they able to do aerobic exercise at a better level? Those types of outcomes, rather than looking at necessarily longevity, which of

Of course, we're still measuring and we are looking at if we increase healthspan, does that serendipitously also then increase lifespan? So rather than trying to increase lifespan first and hope that healthspan catches up,

Can we increase health span and therefore live a longer life? And this doesn't affect their immune system? Because I would think that if you suppress an immune system, you would actually do the opposite of helping with health. Right. Well, we're using it at a much lower dose, and we are certainly monitoring for other health outcomes along the way. Okay. So let's get back to, like, a big picture here. Like, so we're studying all these dogs' health. We have now a better database that hopefully can grow. Yeah.

What can that do for human health? And the study of, like, healthy in our lifespan also have a longer health span. Yeah. So I think of it as a sentinel project in that dogs are essentially serving as a sentinel for health threats for human populations. Right.

So that's kind of like we didn't know that BPA was a problem until we noticed BPA was affecting fish and streams. And then we figured out that this additive in our plastics was a problem not just for fish but also for humans. Or like we used to use canaries and chlorophyll.

I was going to say like a canary in a coal mine. Is that what you mean by sentinel? I've never actually used that word, a sentinel. Yeah. So I think of it, it is like the canary in the coal mine. The only difference is that our dogs aren't sacrificial. Canaries were used in a very sacrificial way and we certainly don't mean that for our dogs because...

because it's that their lifespan is shorter and therefore their health outcomes happen more rapidly. Because of that, we're able to detect threats in them faster than we can in human populations. With our dog populations, when you think about five years of the dog aging project,

that's half of the lifespan for a lot of the dogs that are in the project. So we're actually able to kind of get this whole life exposure information or the exposome information and then get their health outcomes as well. For instance, if we look at cancer outcomes in these dogs,

And then we have all of this information about their life. We can interrogate these data to determine were there risks that they were exposed to? Were there things in their environments? Did they eat the wrong types of food? Did they not get enough exercise? We kind of get these clues as to what might have actually led to the development of those health outcomes. And then it can help us to understand better threats that might also impact our human health outcomes.

Yeah, I like that. What do you hope to then learn in the years and decades to come, you know, about dog health, about human health? Like, what are your next steps?

Well, ultimately, I would really like to know what the right recipe is for a long, healthy life for our dog companions. I would like for us to figure out, like, what are the things that we can do to optimize health within that species? I do think that learning those keys in the dog population will help us in terms of figuring out what's the right combination of things for the human population as well.

Really what I'm focused on right now are getting better data around the environmental exposures. What are the silent threats that we are living with? What are the chemicals in our environment? Are there things that we should be removing from our households? Are there things we should be adding? So I'm really starting to delve into that piece and just trying to figure out what are the things that we can change to make our lives better.

And one last very important question, like when are you launching the cat aging project? So I have no plans to launch a cat aging project, but would be more than happy to help anyone who's interested in launching such an endeavor. That's quite all right. I will, you know, we'll find those people. Don't worry. Thank you, Audrey, so much for talking to us about the dog aging project. Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure.

You can learn more about this project, including how to enroll your own dog, by visiting dogagingproject.org or check our show notes. If you liked this episode, make sure you never miss a new one by following us on whatever podcasting platform you're listening from. And if you have a science question you'd like us to investigate, send us an email at shortwave at npr.org.

This episode was produced by Burleigh McCoy, edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez, and fact-checked by Tyler Jones. The audio engineer was Kweisi Lee. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to ShoreWave, the science podcast from NPR. ♪

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