Dog Aging Project

The Dog Aging Project, or Dog Ageing Project, is a long-term biological study of aging in dogs, centered at the University of Washington. Professors Daniel Promislow and Matt Kaeberlein are the co-directors of the project. The project consists of research on understanding dog aging and using pharmaceuticals to potentially increase life span of dogs. The project has implications for improving the life spans of humans and is an example of geroscience.

As of 2016, the project consists of two parts, one on the effect of the pharmaceutical rapamycin on dog longevity, a pharmaceutical which has shown indications of extended longevity in other species such as mice. The other part of the trial is a longitudinal study conducted across the United States in which individual dogs are followed for the duration of their lives to understand the biological and environmental factors that influence dog longevity. As of 2016, approximately 10,000 dogs were part of the project. The project recruits dog owners to register their dogs in the project, and therefore the project is an example of citizen science.

A premise of the project is that dogs may be a sentinel species for humans since they live in the same environment as humans. The project may thereby help identify risk factors that influence human life span. Since dogs age significantly more rapidly than humans, data on aging can be generated much more rapidly using a dog model than in human studies. A further premise is that the longitudinal portion of the project seeks to understand the underlying biology of aging, as opposed to understanding individual age-related diseases. In this respect, if the aging process itself is addressed, then several age-related diseases could be delayed or avoided simultaneously. This is important because elderly individuals often have multiple chronic disease conditions.

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