How Dogs Can Help Us Live Longer, Healthier Lives

Our best friends’ biology could unlock the secret to ageing well

- Andy Ridgway

How would you react if someone told you that just taking some pills or having an injection could add 20 years to your life? Not only that, but those extra two decades would be healthy years. You would probably not believe them.

But for the past few decades, research has been taking place to understand exactly what happens when we age and what drives those changes. While the effects of ageing have always been abundantly clear, what’s going on inside our bodies that makes those things happen has not.

Now, a new wave of this research into the science of ageing is taking place not in humans, but in our closest companions – dogs. While studying dogs may not seem the most obvious way to try and understand human ageing, our furry friends can actually give us insights into our biology that we cannot.

Dogs share our homes, so they are exposed to many of the same factors that influence how well we age. But they also age much faster than we do – providing scientists with a accelerated view of the processes. There’s another important factor too. When you put the fur and four legs to one side, dogs and humans are much more alike than you might think.

It’s why several large research projects have sprung up in the past few years that are seeking to understand how dogs age – not only to help them, but us too. One of the most recent additions to the pack is the Dog Aging Project in the US, which since its launch in November 2019 has recruited 80,000 canine participants. The scientists involved with it will soon be picking over the lifestyles and health of these dogs to see what they can uncover.