Week’s Review of Canine Social Media – 1/7/23

By Doggieuk9
/ January 7, 2023
/ Blog, Weekend Updates
/ Tags: Dog Aging Project, Some wonderful dog situations from Social Media

Welcome to the Week’s Review of Canine Social Media

Welcome to this Special Feature on the DoggieU K9 Blog for an update on this week’s dog-related media and social media from around the world. There are so many stories. Here we will share some of the best stories this week.

Enjoy & share them.

The Dog Aging Project Still Looking for Volunteers

Modern science has finally come to the realization that the best window into human health and longevity is sitting under everyone’s kitchen table.

For several decades scientists have tried to extrapolate meaningful research data from fruit flies and lab rats to no avail. What no one noticed was that our dogs participate in every facet of our daily lives. They breathe our air, drink our water, flop on our furniture and scarf down our food. They go everywhere and experience everything we do under the most exacting, real-time conditions. Yes, according to findings published in Scientific Reports, our prehistoric sidekick is a bounty of information on health and lifespan.

That overdue discovery prompted the creation of the Dog Aging Project in 2014–an ongoing data collection project on canine illness and aging funded by the National Institute on Aging. So far, this experiment has spawned wide-ranging interest and several research trials within the academic community, including Texas A & M, the University of Washington, and Cornell College of Veterinary Medicine. The resultant treasure trove of raw data has already become a conduit for grants to develop life-extending drugs and create a biobank for future research.

At the moment, 40,000 dogs are enrolled in the Dog Aging Project and they hope to eventually recruit 100,000 for ongoing data gathering.

The big goal is obviously to find new insights into the key factors that dictate lifespan. And so far, despite the lack of scientifically controlled conditions, this project is providing tremendous insights into human health and aging. And the biggest topic at the moment is age-related dementia.

Veterinary info suggests that 14-35 percent of all dogs will be diagnosed with canine cognitive dysfunction. That’s just an ‘educated guess’ since, until now, there’s been no focused interest (or funding) to study this problem. But that’s changing because the symptoms and disease progression have startling similarities to conditions in the human population.
Unlike previous attempts to gather useful data, this info is drawn from ongoing survey reporting by owners rather than veterinary assessments which don’t provide the same degree of intimate detail regarding daily routine and environment. And those are precisely the tidbits that make this current investigation so valuable.

Even though the biological aging process occurs much more rapidly in dogs, precisely the same factors come into play. Considering how closely our dogs share every part of our lives, that makes perfect sense. Surveys ask about a dog’s behavior and changes in behavior over time and those responses are coupled with information about each participant’s health, lifestyle and habits.

Current research suggests that human health and longevity is 75 percent environmental and 25 percent genetic – and the varying influences that make the difference closely mirror the behaviors and habits of each person’s canine counterpart. And some of their findings tell us things we may not want to hear. For example, a broad, year-long study has come to the same dreary conclusions. For a longer healthier life, eat less. This study showed that dogs fed once per day had much better outcomes, as did dogs that participated in regular, daily exercise.