Daniel Promislow, UW professor and principal investigator, talks about the Dog Aging Project
Researcher’s departed dog Frisbee, a model for healthy aging, inspires his work
At the Veterinary Scholars Symposium in August, University of Washington Professor Daniel Promislaw presented an overview of the Dog Aging Project, a research initiative that brings together dogs, owners, veterinarians, researchers and volunteers to carry out the most ambitious canine health study in the world. Promislaw, a principal investigator for the research, described how the project team is following tens of thousands of dogs for 10 years or more to identify the biological, lifestyle and environmental factors that maximize healthy longevity. Veterinary33 was onsite and we wanted to provide our readers with the latest details on this project.
Q: Tell us about your background and how you got involved in The Dog Aging Project
Promislaw: As a graduate student, I studied the evolution of life history strategies in mammals. A life history strategy refers to the set of traits that define the rate of development, growth, maturation and aging. In mammals, these include gestation length, offspring size and number, time to maturity, age at reproduction, frequency of reproduction, aging and longevity, and so forth. Although only a portion of my graduate work focused on aging, it was that part that stuck. Now more than 30 years later, I am still working on the topic. And as an evolutionary biologist, I have always been interested in variation—why are some species longer-lived than others? Within a species, why do some individuals live longer than others? And even within a single individual, why do some traits decline faster than others as we age?
A few years after graduate school, I began working on aging in fruit flies, setting up my own fly lab in 1995 at the University of Georgia. But I was still interested in aging in mammals. In 2007, a paper on the genetics of size from Elaine Ostrander’s lab appeared in the journal Science.
Ostrander, now with the National Human Genome Research Institute, and her colleagues showed that while there are many genes that influence size in dogs, one single gene, IGF1, accounts for a very large amount of the variation in size. I was fascinated by this finding, as many studies had already established that IGF1 is also associated with aging. I was also aware that large-breed dogs are much shorter lived, on average, than small breed dogs. Could IGF1 be the reason for this unusual pattern? That would be unusual, because across species, larger species tend to live longer.
Wanting to answer this question, I reached out to my colleagues in the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Georgia, who introduced me to veterinary internal medicine specialist Dr. Kate Creevy. Our conversations quickly led us to realize that there was a tremendous yet unexplored opportunity to study aging in dogs. The rest, as they say, is history. Kate is a co-founder of the project, and our chief veterinary officer.
Q: Do you have a dog? What, if any, personal interest do you have in this research?
Promislaw: At the time that I met Dr. Creevy, our family had two relatively young dogs, Silver, a purebred Weimaraner, and Frisbee, a 45-lb chow-shepherd-spaniel mix. Frisbee lived until the age of 16.5 years, a model of healthy aging for a dog that size. Frisbee was truly an inspiration for this study, which is a labor of love.
Q: What do you think your biggest findings have been to date, and what new studies are in the works?
Promislaw: Since our launch, we have recruited more than 45,000 participating dogs and their owners to our study. We began collecting data in 2020, and our team is now working on a full three years of data. Until now, our focus has been analyzing the huge landscape of owner-reported survey data we have collected. I have been especially excited to see trainees on our team take a lead role in most of the papers we have written, and there are already too many results to mention all of them here. But to point out just a couple, I have been interested to see results showing that exercise is associated with better cognitive function. We have also used our data to understand the complex effects of size on risks of different diseases. Some diseases like cancer are much more common in large breed dogs, others like heart disease show just the opposite effect. Finally, just as in humans, socioeconomic status and home environment influence dog health.
Moving forward, I am excited by the work my colleagues are doing on the effect of environmental quality on health. Also, now that we have multiple years of data, we can begin to carry out longitudinal analyses, asking how features measured earlier are associated with health in later years. This allows us to draw causal relations in a way that is not possible from one-time cross-sectional studies. And finally, we are beginning to analyze molecular data—epigenetic patterns in immune cells, metabolite features in plasma and the fecal microbiome—which we hope will lead to the discovery of new biomarkers of current and future patterns of aging.
Q: You mentioned during your presentation at the Veterinary Scholars Program that the project has a need to incorporate dogs from all types of backgrounds into the study. Why is this important? How do you think this could affect the research?
Promislaw: To fully understand the variation in aging we observe in dogs in the U.S., we need to consider dogs in all environments. In part, as biologists and veterinarians, we are interested in capturing the full range of trait variation, which is shaped, in turn, by genetic variation and environmental variation. If we only study a small subset of environments, we are unlikely to capture the full range of variation in health-related traits, and we will be limited in how much we can learn. But even more importantly, we want to learn how to help dogs live the healthiest long life possible, and to learn this for all dogs, not just those in relatively wealthy environments. We want to help all dogs. And what we learn about the health challenges of dogs in underserved communities is likely to help us better understand health challenges of people living in those same environments.
Q: How many dogs to you have enrolled to date?
Promislaw: Over 45,000 dogs have joined the Dog Aging study so far. And we are still enrolling dogs. We welcome new dogs of all ages, sizes and sexes, purebred and mixed breed.
Q: How do you promote the project and get more participants?
Promislaw: We spread the message to potential Dog Aging Project participants in all sorts of ways — through radio, TV and magazine articles, through social media and through public presentations. We are continuing to explore new ways to get the word out to even more participants. The more people who participate, and the more data we collect, the more we can learn about healthy aging in dogs.
Q: What benefits do pet owners get from enrolling their dog in this project, and how much of a commitment does it take from the pet owner?
Promislaw: It is important for us to share our findings directly with our Dog Aging Project participants. For example, for a subset of dogs, we carry out genetic analysis. We provide a detailed report all about the dog’s genetics to the owner. For others, we collect biospecimens, and for actionable data (like complete blood count, blood chemistry, and urinalysis), we return those results to the owner and their veterinarian free of charge.
All our participants gain the benefit of being part of a nationwide group of community scientists, learning about the joys of being a part of scientific discovery. They also appreciate that science takes time. I have heard from many owners that even if their own dogs don’t benefit from ongoing discoveries, they are happy to be part of a community science study that will help future dogs.
Q: One of my coworkers from Edra has her dog enrolled in the project. They get emails that indicate various tasks they can complete. How did this task-style research come about and what is its overall purpose?
Promislaw: We love the idea of community science — members of the community being active participants in the scientific process. Tasks carried out by owners and their dogs provide a wonderful level of engagement that goes beyond just filling out surveys. So, this supports our core value of community science.
And while there is great power in a researcher being able to directly observe a dog in studying behavior, physiology or health, with many tens of thousands of participating dogs, found in all 50 states, there is no way for us to do this at large scale. Our owner-reported tasks help us bridge this gap.
Q: How can veterinary clinics and practices across the country get involved?
Promislaw: We are continuing to recruit dogs at dogagingproject.org. We encourage veterinarians to tell their clients about this project, whether it be a new client who has just adopted a puppy, or a long-time client bringing in a dog in its geriatric years.
Q: What else would you like to share with that we have not discussed?
Promislaw: We continue to welcome new dogs of all ages to the study. But we also want to recruit dogs from as many different human populations as possible. For example, we would love to create a Spanish version of all our materials to recruit dogs from Spanish speaking populations in the U.S. And eventually, we hope to make the Dog Aging Project an international study, welcoming dogs and their owners from around the world.
Learn more about the project, read previous coverage
Social determinants of health and disease in companion dogs
Advances in dementia in pets | Veterinary 33
Dog Aging Project seeks more good doggos | Veterinary 33
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