( Learn why dementia is more unlikely in wild animals.) While Olby’s laboratory takes the opposite approach to study aging-individual dogs are evaluated by multiple specialists-everyone is seeking answers to the same questions, she says. In some cases, owners also supply veterinary records and biological samples, such as genetic material. Founded in 2014 by Kate Creevy, Daniel Promislow, and Matt Kaeberlein, and funded in part by grants from the National Institute on Aging, the novel project collects information about tens of thousands of dogs across the United States as they grow. It’s possible because of the Dog Aging Project. This recent study, however, uses data from a groundbreaking 15,000 dogs. In the field of veterinary medicine, a study of a hundred dogs is often looked at as impressively large, says Natasha Olby, a clinician scientist and veterinarian at North Carolina State University, who was not involved in the new study. The Dog Aging ProjectĮarlier studies have found a connection between aging and CCD, but they’ve tended to be much smaller in scope.
That will require more research to untangle, Yarborough says. In other words, they can’t say for sure that inactivity led to CCD or if developing CCD triggered the inactivity. What’s more, dogs described as inactive by their owners were nearly 6.5 times more likely to suffer from CCD-though the experts stress that this link was a correlation, not causation. “When two dogs have the same sterilization status, health problems, breed type, and activity level, the risk of CCD is 52 percent higher in the dog who is one year older than the one who is one year younger,” says Yarborough, who is also the lead author of a study published today in Scientific Reports. In the end, the scientists learned that the odds of CCD went up by more than half for each year of a dog’s life. ( Here’s why chocolate labs don’t live as long as other retrievers.) After all, dogs as a species- Canis familiaris-include everything from the teacup Chihuahua to the Great Dane, and those differences in size, shape, and demeanor could skew the findings. To dive more deeply into risk factors associated with CCD, Yarborough and her colleagues recently collected data from more than 15,000 owners about their pooches, and then adjusted that information to account for variables such as age, breed, and activity level. “Gaining a better understanding of how these diseases manifest in our dog population may give us clues that will better explain the disease progression of diseases like dementia,” she says. “Dogs experience many of the same age-related diseases that we do,” says Sarah Yarborough, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington Department of Family Medicine, in an email. Other symptoms can include disrupted sleeping patterns, loss of spatial awareness, and new and unusual social behaviors. But in extreme cases, scientists say, dogs can experience something called canine cognitive dysfunction, or CCD for short. Memory loss and cognitive decline are common enough for aging dogs, just as they are for humans. Is your old but beloved family dog suddenly having accidents in the house or getting lost in corners? Has it seemed like your pet sometimes doesn’t recognize someone they’ve known all their life?
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