Old Dogs, New Research and the Secrets of Aging | Hacker News Reader

Old Dogs, New Research and the Secrets of Aging

nytimes.com

85 pointsgmays50 comments

From my grandparent to me, there has always been German Shepherds in our family. Starting the 80's all of our dogs started dying much earlier, ~6-7 of cancer. In the early 2000's, we switched to raw diet from premium store bought kibble to raw. Sure enough, not only did their coat improve not a single cancer death under age of 13. I know it's anecdotal, but in my dog world circle and family, we've all observed similar results.

It's a cruel that our best friends and most loyal companions live such short lives as it is. Giving them top nutrition is a small price for the added years.

As to how this applies to humans? If you want to live a long and healthy life: avoid processed foods.

Counterpoint: My dog survived distemper as a puppy and had life-long digestive issues. I tried all sorts of elimination diets, raw foods, probiotics, etc. Nothing worked. I finally put him on a Rx dog food from purina with high fiber and a bunch of the 'garbage' ingredients I spent years trying to avoid. His digestive issues disappeared and he had some of the best years of his life. He died close to 17 years old, which isn't bad for a 42 pound dog.

Dogs evolved to eat human scraps. Raw diets may be better nutritionally than kibbles, but cooking the same food is more nutritious and much safer[1] than raw food.

After talking to board-certified vets who actually research this stuff, I feed my dog home-cooked human-grade food.

1. https://skeptvet.com/Blog/2018/02/yet-another-study-shows-th...

Growing up my mother let us feed our dog whatever leftovers we had after our dinner, which would sometimes be half a steak that one of my siblings didn't finish or a bowl of liver-paté growing stale in the fridge. She'd make up the difference with generic dog food.

Our dog had a clear preference for our food, and it felt deeply wrong when we would feed it only dog food. It was a part of our family why should it not eat like we did?

If I ever adopt a dog for my family, it will be fed the same way.

The handful of dogs I knew that broke 18+ years were mutts on garbage kibble like Ol' Roy. And these were medium-sized dogs (30-50lbs), not Chihuahuas.

Anyone I know who can afford to feed their dogs raw also generally get purebred or "designer breed" dogs, and they've all lead shorter lives with more diseases (cancers, autoimmune disorders, bone problems, etc).

My anecdotal experience leads me to believe that breeding practices are a bigger part of the problem, but these are quite small sample sizes.

> purebred or "designer breed" dogs, and they've all lead shorter lives with more diseases

Absolutely, this is also true. But in my case, I’ve never owned and now avoid AKC purebreds like the plague. Currently I have a long-coat non-AKC GS with 25% Malamute mix. AKC and their sire syndrome has destroyed the breed with Hip dysplasia and other issues. Their obsession with artificial looks and willful ignorance of genetics has completely turned me off.

Also can't compare a 50lbs dog to 80-100 lbs GSD. Smaller breeds on average live longer. We had a 10 lbs coton de teuer live to 20 which is not that uncommon for the breed.

I wish I would have known about this a while ago, lost my GSD over 2 years ago with spleen cancer at 11. Still Sprinting up stairs and playing with toys, up to the week before. Still am pissed how it ended.

Semi-related: "Why old dogs are the best dogs" https://theweek.com/articles/511596/why-old-dogs-are-best-do...

> Puppies are incomparably cute and incomparably entertaining, and, best of all, they smell exactly like puppies. At middle age, a dog has settled into the knuckleheaded matrix of behavior we find so appealing — his unquestioning loyalty, his irrepressible willingness to please, his infectious happiness. But it is not until a dog gets old that his most important virtues ripen and coalesce. Old dogs can be cloudy-eyed and grouchy, gray of muzzle, graceless of gait, odd of habit, hard of hearing, pimply, wheezy, lazy, and lumpy. But to anyone who has ever known an old dog, these flaws are of little consequence. Old dogs are vulnerable. They show exorbitant gratitude and limitless trust. They are without artifice. They are funny in new and unexpected ways. But, above all, they seem at peace.

I've noticed more health and aging related articles on this site. I wonder if its a sign the HN community is getting older. :)

The site is almost 15 years old so it’s possible.

People become a little more self-aware as they get older.

First you know someone famous that died young from a horrible disease.

Next you personally know someone who died from a disease.

Then you get older and wonder if the “1 in 3 people” might be you.

I take anti-aging drugs for about 10 years. I heard about them at HN.

How has that worked out for you? What are you taking?

I survived about ten attempts to assassinate me. Still alive.

Quercetin and glycine. IMHO, they help to stay healthy and slow aging, but does not stop it. I also tried resveratrol and nicotinamide for a few months.

Is there good evidence for quercetin alone? I recall reading a bit about quercetin with other things (I think it was a chemo med at lower dose) as a senolytic but not quercetin alone.

What's in your stack bruh?

Metformin 1g twice a day

MSM 3g + Vitamin C 1g + NAC 600mg thrice a day

Kimchi (for Vitamin K) at breakfast, Niacinamide from a multivitamin B + Vitamin D 5kUI + Magnesium glycinate at night, with Melatonin 60 mg sublingual at night (20x the doses for sleeping is among other things anti-inflammatory and radioprotective)

Every few months an azythromycin+doxycyclin+vitamin C cure as a senolytic: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6520007/

Every few month a dasatinib+quercetin cure as another senolytic : https://sci-hub.se/10.1146/annurev-pharmtox-050120-105018

BTW dasatinib+quercetin are also in clinical trials NCT02848131 and NCT02874989

Betting this is berberine or metformin?

Outliving your parents is very perspective changing.

Knowing people younger than you who die of old man's diseases.

Your doctor is younger than you are.

The President is younger than you are.

Your longtime friends look old.

Could be that “pandemic” thing making people a bit more cognizant of mortality.

The people dying of COVID are for the most part over age 70. Many are over 80. This is an age where death and disease are unremarkable.

> for the most part over age 70.

CDC categories don't line up to "70" that well, but there are plenty of younger deaths.

51% are 74 or younger.

33% are 64 or younger.

https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Death-Counts-...

I think you should check the very link you sent because only 21% are 64 or younger. The ranges overlap.

That's not necessarily what OP's saying. My inference is that OP is suggesting that a constantly prevalent pandemic makes people more likely to think about their own health and mortality in a broader sense than they might if there weren't a pandemic.

I think the increase of popularity of these types of articles happened mostly before the pandemic.

I think a lot of it is that we're just now starting to get to where we need to be as a civilization for anti-aging to start to become something that not only sounds feasible, but is feasible. I've noticed interest steadily increasing over the last 5 or so years, and think this will be a huge topic in the next few decades.

The aging-related research has been going for quite some time, so it's not surprising it's starting to bear fruit, for now in the form of better understanding of the underlying mechanisms. The consensus seems to be shifting from "wear-and-tear model" to a series pre-programmed epigenetic alterations, which, to me at least as a layman, feels more plausible. There's a good chance we'll see some anti-aging treatments released within our lifetimes. We might end up being the first generation to have reached the longevity escape velocity.

The reason it's only starting to emerge now is as far as I understand that molecular biology is a relatively new field, and the related technologies simply didn't exist not so long ago.

Whenever travel to The Stars comes up on Hacker News, lots of people chime in with the impossibility of it all because of the hard limit of c, calling all such "Warp Speed" or "Hyperspace" notions handwaving fantasy.

But that overlooks age extension. Even if this Universe's rules make FTL impossible, 500 year lifespans changes it all. And that seems more likely with every passing decade.

> And that seems more likely with every passing decade.

How so?

Average/median life expectancy has gone up, sure. But we had 80+ y.o. and 90+ y.o. people in the Roman Empire, too.

Tell me where's the real science to suggest that we are really extending lifespans. I don't see much.

We aren't. Yet. Gerontology has nothing to do with past public health improvements. Just like horses didn't evolve over generations into the automobile, anti-aging technology breakthroughs will be new tech and irregular. Such as telomere modification. And probably kill some people at first. "You can tell the pioneers by the arrows in their backs."

It's unfortunate that the chart in the NYT article shows the incorrect Labrador:Tom Hanks mapping. The figure from the paper with the correct mapping is here:

https://marlin-prod.literatumonline.com/cms/attachment/f65cb...

It's odd that this article doesn't mentioned Celevity, which is definitely one of the big players in this field.

The best thing I learned from this article: to calculate a dog's human age, you don't multiply their age times 7 (7x). You use the following formula:

ln(x)*16+31

It makes sense, because a 1-year-old dog definitely seems much more grown up than a 7 year old kid.

Anecdotally I'm assuming this equation must be breed-specific because I've had a number of dogs 8+ years old that did not appear to act or look very senior.

I think it has to be because I've heard small dogs age more slowly. Maybe there's a way to adjust for weight/breed that I could find if I were willing to dig through the original research paper.

Playing around with the numbers a bit, I think it's pretty seriously wrong.

A 6-month old dog is still a child, in dog terms. This formula says they're nearly 20 years old; I'd be inclined to say that the "right" answer is more like 15 years, if not less.

A 1-year old dog is beyond adolescence but is still maturing, but this formula says they're 31 years old, well into adulthood.

A 5-year old dog is in the prime of their life; this formula says they're 56 years old, well into the range of what we'd consider a senior.

A 30-year old dog would set a new world record. (The oldest dog known was about 29.5 years old.) This formula maps that to 85 years, which is old, but not extraordinarily so.

Actually I think I agree with your assessment more. None of the age alignments really make a whole lot of sense to me, even for bigger breeds of dogs. Also, I feel like I've noticed adolescent and mischevious behavior in some of our dogs well into the 2-3 age range on occasion

This behavior mainly noted for cocker spaniels and Korean jindos

Giant breeds mature much more slowly, taking two to three years to be fully grown, and effectively age faster after they reach that point, to the extent that they'd be considered elderly by eight or nine years. The 16ln(x)+31 formula already overestimates the effective age of young dogs and underestimates for old dogs; taking giant breeds into consideration just makes its failures even worse.

Right? My yellow labrador is pushing 11 and he's all but indistinguishable from his 2-year-old self, aside from a relatively minor decline in energy.

We call him the Eternal Puppy. We expected aging was going to catch up by now. Still very little sign that it's happening.

If I had that dog's energy, I would never be out of shape.

Umm...doesn't the formula imply that the dog age starts at 31?

That makes no sense either. My 1 year old dog is definitely not a 31 year old adult as far as behavior goes (incidentally, I am myself ~31,).

I'd put 1 year approximately equivalent to a teenager, depending on the size of the breed (12 year old for larger breeds, late teens for small breeds)

Not quite. Ages are usually counted from 0. ln(0) is undefined, but after that from the first moment after birth until some time in its 52nd day, a dog's age is negative in dog-time (that's probably why it's considered important for the puppy to remain with its parents during this period; a negative-aged dog on its own is like a naked singularity). Then from day 52 to the end of its first year, the dog will age from 0 to 31.

The other end of the scale is surprising too: 200 human years is less than 116 dog years.

I think you need to take the dog's weight and breed into account. Something like: https://www.akc.org/expert-advice/health/how-to-calculate-do....

> the Vienna study dogs were all Border collies, so I’m a little surprised that any of them were mature. That would suggest a certain calm, a willingness to tilt the head and muse that doesn’t seem to fit the breed, with its desperate desire to be constantly chasing sheep, geese, children or Frisbees.

I had a border collie from 6 weeks through every stage there is. And while I may be biased, I’d counter point that the author is ignorant here.

I’ve been lucky enough to have many “smart breeds” in my life. Labs, shepherds, etc. and the border collie is the most human in personality. They are just extremely smart. But in a different way that makes them seem more human. Like they have reasoning skills at a higher level. Head tilting in this breed is a body language. My dog and I had a full language we spoke based on head tilts, eye movements and other minor body movements. I could nod my head from across a park/field and he knew if he was getting food, water, a ball, if I was calling a route for him to run, or if it was just time to go home to say a few. This body language extended into pretty much all situations. Most people thought/joked he read my mind because it wasn’t like it was sign language. The movements were so subtle people didn’t even notice them. And I could read his movements too.

Any way , I think this is a great breed for this type of study. I certainly remember my dog’s phases fondly and can relate to the basis of the study.

aging (and anti-aging medication) has the potential to become the next big thing.

My dog is part if the DogAgingProject and it’s really exciting to see some focus on something that impacts all of us.

I have such mixed feelings about this.

It's not a great movie but this really does remind me of Elysium, in that we're truly heading for a world where those with means can live indefinitely. And those without means...

And those without means...

Will also be able to get antiaging treatments, if for no other reason that it would save a fortune in medical expenses.

I dont understand this argument. Let's for a moment think it will happen (it wont, any actual anti-aging treatment would be immediately commoditized)How is that situation "worse" than the one we have right now?

Why would you imagine it this way? All the work that's been done on longevity has been relatively cheap clinically. I really think you're underestimating how widely accessible age-reversing medicines and technologies could become. Perhaps you are American, and this is the problem. In many places programs of universal health care would be very happy to cover treatment that would make you young and healthy again. I can't imagine a better ROI for reducing health care costs (ie: eliminating the burdens of aging of populations on "the system"). In other words, those without means will also be perfectly fine, because outside of the US, it benefits society to keep them healthy.

I was a regular at the HN London Meetups, when I was living over there, and fondly remember (after yet another founder anecdote on stage) someone tweeting “Do founders at dog food companies eat their own dog food?”

Many years later two owners of a dog food company attended one of my workshops, so I had the chance to ask them in person. They never had. (Although several younger employees had done so, with no side effects.)

http://archive.is/gw79L

You should have your dog on rapamycin.

Assuming you want it healthy and to live longer and can pay for that.

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