1/25/2024 0 Comments Animal age years“Whilst a 30-year-old human might have cells of an analogous ‘age’ to a one-year-old dog, many dogs won’t be fully grown at this time and they will still have unsettled hormones and behaviour associated with puberty,” she said, noting that one-year-old dogs act more like human teenagers. “If we think about ageing in terms of how old our cells are, this new paper is really useful in matching up human and dog years,” she said, adding that such biological ageing is important for medical and veterinary health.īut, she said, the match breaks down if ageing is considered in terms of behaviours, hormones or growth – meaning we shouldn’t be surprised at the escapades of young dogs. Prof Lucy Asher, an expert in canine puberty at Newcastle University who was not involved in the research, said she welcomed the study. These are involved in a variety of functions linked to development, including the assembly of synapses – junctions between neurons. The team adds that the study suggests humans and dogs accumulate methyl groups on some of the same genes as they age. They note that the links are more approximate when it comes to adolescent and mid-life milestones, but they are still more accurate than the previous idea that dogs consistently age at seven times the rate of humans. “In seniors, the expected lifespan of labrador retrievers, 12 years, correctly translated to the worldwide lifetime expectancy of humans, 70 years. “For instance, the epigenome translated seven weeks in dogs to nine months in humans, corresponding to the infant stage when deciduous teeth erupt in both puppies and babies,” the team wrote in a preprint of the study. But, they say, for young and old dogs, the age relationship seems to reflect the times at which humans and dogs experience particular milestones. The team says the work now needs to be repeated in other breeds of dog. In maths, ln refers to the natural logarithm of a number. The relationship, the team say, is described by the formula: human age = 16 ln(dog_age) + 31. The findings suggest a one-year-old dog would have a “human age” of about 30, while by the age of four they’d be about 54 in “human years”, and by 14 they would be on a par with a human in their mid-70s. However, as time passes, the rate of ageing in dogs, compared with humans, slows down. ![]() ![]() Instead, dogs show far more rapid accumulation of methyl groups in their genome than humans within their first year or so, suggesting they age at a much faster rate. The results, which draw on genetic data from about 100 labrador retrievers from puppies to elderly animals, reveal every dog year is not equivalent to seven human years. ![]() The team looked at the way particular molecules, called methyl groups, accumulated in certain areas of the human genome over time and compared them with how they accumulated in similar areas in the dog genome. Writing in the journal Cell Systems, researchers at the University of California San Diego’s school of medicine describe how they focused on epigenetic changes to DNA – modifications that don’t change the DNA sequence but can switch genes on or off.
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