My senior dog, Stevie, is one of the best friends I’ve ever had. She’s 13 now and while she’s very spry for her age, I know she’s not going to live forever. If I could do anything to keep her in my life longer, I would. Unfortunately, we haven’t found the fountain of puppy youth, yet, but these pioneering scientists are trying to figure out how to make dogs live longer. And they might learn something about human aging in the process, too.
The Dog Aging Project (DAP) was launched in 2018 in order to examine how aging affects dogs. Today, the interdisciplinary DAP published a report in the science journal, Nature, outlining their plans for the next decade, which is significant because it will be the first long-term dog study of its magnitude. These scientists already have 32,000 dogs of all kinds around the country registered in the study, and they plan to enroll thousands more to sequence their genomes in order to try to figure out what variables make dogs live longer.
