Anti-aging drug for dogs moves closer to gaining FDA approval
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Reasonable expectation of effectiveness for large dog lifespan extension - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38447491 - Nov 2023 (186 comments)
This is a miracle drug that pretty much instantly changed both my (older) dogs' lives. Every vet tech I've spoken to (it's a monthly injection) agrees it is amazing.
He also loves the cold, and he's always more active in the winter anyway. I would say he's close to the level he was last winter instead of slightly declined. That's great, but not miraculous.
We'll stick with the regimen and see if he continues to improve. I'll upgrade my judgement if he starts climbing stairs again.
The other comments imply the same; it will depend a bit on the dog's condition. That being said, I still stand by my miracle drug assertion. And seemingly side-effect free.
We thought we were going to have to say goodbye to our girl back in February this year. Her arthritis was so bad, she'd stopped using the litter and was... Backed up, let's just say.
But she's currently curled up right next to me, and generally acts like she used to a couple years ago. You can tell her legs are weaker than they were, but the pain doesn't bother her anymore.
Miracle is a pretty reasonable word, yeah.
36 hours later, the limping stops and the dog wants to walk further than he has in years. We take him to doggy daycare once a week since his housemate passed, and daycare staff commented on how he was like a new dog. Not every day is a great day, but most of them are.
My girl has had shoulder arthritis for years and walked with a limp. We had her on daily pain medication and we tried multiple kinds because they weren't very effective. It always was a chore because she hated the pills and would literally eat around them in placed inside a treat (she wouldn't even take the flavored ones). She was in pain and would basically just lay down all day.
Now? No limping anymore. No pills. She isn't scared to go up and down the stairs. Jumping on and off the couch without missing going up or being scared to hop down. Running around with my other dog.
It's really been night and day.
He isn't back to being a kitten, you should have appropriate expectations, but he wasn't able to jump on or off the couch before, now he can. He is walking around more than he used to, before he would spent most of the day in his box. The effect of getting him more exercise is compounding his good health.
If you have an older cat/dog you should definitely talk to your vet about it.
Edit: Getting some great tips on core diet and health down below! Luckily we're already doing most of those, and I guess I'm largely wondering about advancements in supplementation or preventative medicine (of course everything would have to be considered with a veterinarian). Here are other basic things we already do:
* My most important thing is not giving any dry food. Especially since one of my cats is prone to urinary problems and gets sick within just a couple of weeks if given even a partially-dry diet. But even if he wasn't prone to it, with what I've learned over the years I would not feed any cat dry food.
* We eat partly wet partly homemade raw (but the latter needs to come with careful research and caveats since cats have very delicate nutritional needs).
* Keep water bowls away from food and switch bowls/fountain once in a while for novelty.
* Indoor-only and we go for walks on a harness for enrichment when the weather is nice.
Aside from that, Maines are already a very long lived generally healthy breed.
So glad your cat is happy and pain-free!
Her kidneys were mostly fine and it wasn’t a concern the last time we checked (about 6 months ago)
I think she lived so long because she was allergic to most commercially available food (chicken and beef allergy) so we had to feed her higher quality food with 95+% meat. We also put her water in a different spot or the house (cats hate drinking where they eat, the smell of food near water makes them think it’s unsafe to drink so they’ll drink much less of it)
She was an indoors only cat for the last 10 years of her life after some crazy junky partially shaved her.
If we ever get over the pain and get a new cat, I’d do it all over again:
- high quality, 95+% meat food (dry and wet, the cat picks whenever she’s hungry)
- indoors only (no crazy people, no antifreeze, no cars, no cats/animals fights)
- water bowl far away from food bowls
Not a miracle recipe, but she was older than any other cat I’ve known.
Luckily I already do all of these! (Except for dry food; we do wet and raw only here)
For dry food, vets told us some cats like it better but it also helps with oral health as it removes some of the plaque by friction and keeps the gums healthier by stimulating ligaments holding the teeth from the crunching.
From what I understand the plaque thing with dry food is a bit of a myth. After all, we don't brush our teeth by eating crackers. So I brush their teeth with a toothbrush and enzymatic toothpaste instead! For stimulating ligaments, that's really interesting. I feed largely a (balanced) homemade raw diet alongside commercial wet and suspect/hope having them chew through solid chunks of raw muscle meat would achieve a similar effect.
If the wet food is chewy then I guess it’d be very similar to dry food. Our cat’s food consistency was softer so she’s need the hard kibbles to crunch on.
Losing a pet is never easy I think. Even if it isn’t human, it becomes a member of the family with its own character, habits, and behaviour. It does create a void when they go but it’s unfortunately inevitable. It’s difficult to know when is the right time, but I believe it’s worse to leave a pet suffer because its owner doesn’t have the empathy to call it.
But otherwise, it's fine. We were feeling guilty about keeping our cat indoors after the incident (it's not in their nature, etc) but every (North American) vet told us that they'd love it if all the cats they look after were indoors. They'd have way less diseases, wounds, maiming, etc. In Europe, vets weren't as adamant about keeping the cat indoors but they all agreed it's still better than outdoors. Our cat lived both in Canada and Switzerland.
Whenever we were hearing vicious cat fights outside for 10--15 minutes at a time, it felt very nice to look at ours peacefully curled on our bed rather than worrying if that was the sound of our cat losing an eye or getting notched ears and the expensive associated subsequent vet visit. They also require less vaccines from not being exposed to other cats and animals, and even though the vaccines are safe, it's still avoiding the very low chance of an adverse reaction (and the cost of the shot and boosters).
I think this right here is the smartest thing you can do. Cats are obligate carnivores, and some of the crap in the stores is just fillers they crap out anyway. Same with dog food - they design it to make poop more solid and easier to deal with.
Please protect your loved ones and stay away from pitbulls and pitbull mixes. They are total sweet hearts, right up until they're not.
Edit: I too was once a 'how it's raised' apologist. After a number of experiences and some research, my mind is concluded. Someone in the replies was kind enough to post papers, but if you don't have time for reading, this will express the overall point that these dogs are land-mines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9ZGEvUwSMg
If you think you can readily find 10+ reports of 'unprovoked lethal violence with no prior history of violence' for another breed, please, be my guest.
Generally most people shouldn't have dogs because they lack the time and energy to properly train them (or in the case of adult dogs: to compensate for their lack of training). But you're right that there are some dog breeds that are more prone to biting accidents than others: but if you go by the actual numbers your advice should also explicitly apply to German shepherds.
Pretty much everything people say about Pit Bulls today was said about other breeds before, including German Shepards and Doberman Pinschers.
I think the change over time is mostly fashion trends among people who deliberately keep and train dogs for actual or perceived viciousness, and media trends interacting with that.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8597704/figure/... (bitten by a pit bull increased as the level of intervention increased from no repair (6.0%) to repair in the OR (25.8%))
https://www.dogsbite.org/dog-bite-statistics-multi-year-fata... 2/3rds of fatal attacks.
People make up all kinds of pseudoscience about why pit bulls are involved in so many severe attacks (e.g. the myth of "locking jaws" after a bite - which isn't a thing in any dog breed). The core problem with most of these claims is that "pit bull" is not a breed but actually a number of different breeds and mutts, many of which aren't even related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit_bull
All of these contribute to statistics involving "pit bulls" (contrast this with German shepherds, which are very narrowly defined) and even then this ignores that people looking for aggressive dogs often want "pit bulls" because of their reputation and make them aggressive (i.e. traumatized) before they eventually end up as rescues in situations where the aggression endangers children.
I don't like dogs, generally, and I don't like most "pit bulls" because of their looks alone, but most of the studies people like to cite uses garbage data that fails to consistently define "pit bulls" (if you look at the methodology the groupings usually rely on what breed the dog is registered as which tells you nothing given that "pit bull" isn't a breed and various mutts will be lumped in as well) on top of being misrepresented by people trying to reaffirm their biases instead of looking at the complex socio-cultural context. Heck, most studies don't even correct for population sizes (i.e. giving statistics about registered dog breeds relative to the number of dogs registered for each breed).
Most of the difference between dog breeds are cosmetic, some are physical, very few are "neurological" but at the end of the day, all dogs are domesticated predators, all dogs can bite and dog bites can be life threatening to humans. All things considered, dog breed is one of the least important factors to whether a given dog poses a threat or not. Yeah, big dogs are more likely to bite in a way that is life threatening and anxious dogs are more likely to bite and abused dogs are more likely to be anxious and dog breeds seen as "aggressive" are more likely to be abused. But given how diverse and hetereogenous the group of dogs classified as "pit bulls" is, any genetic argument is clearly nonsense and just because you can misinterpret studies to reaffirm your biases that doesn't mean you're not just trying to find a simple and easy to reason about explanation to a very complex problem.
Anyone who says otherwise is lying to you or themselves.
EDIT:
None of the papers folks have posted control for training or socialization. I grant you that due to socioeconomic factors you will in fact find more samples of aggressive pitbulls than aggressive dogs of other breeds in most regions, but that is not what's under discussion.
They are a physically strong breed that is capable of lots of damage when not trained well, but that's true of many other breeds too. It's just less common (these days) to see abused or neglected german shepherds, rottweilers, sheepdogs, huskies, etc.
The video you posted is a sensationalist news story, not any kind of actual analysis.
I've had dogs all my life - many breeds. We currently have a rescue that is a pit/lab mix and although she is sweet as could be to humans, she is a menace at the dog park or day care. Constantly trying to fight.
Folks who say that breeds don't matter are deluding themselves. Pits are just plain aggressive. There's a reason that every time you see a "DOG MAULS CHILD" headline, it's always one of the same few breeds (hint: it's never a golden retriever).
Think through the potential consequences. If a beagle freaks out and bites a toddler then they might need a few stitches. With a pitbull it can be fatal.
Don’t judge someone just because they own a pitbull. The breed isn’t the fundamental problem.
Natural selection doesn't necessarily favor genes that optimize the health of a particular animal. Natural selection favors genes that optimize for more copies of themselves, at whatever cost to their current carriers. Perhaps under some scenarios of canine evolution, the fittest genes might have been ones that selected for higher turnover than would happen if bodies wore out naturally.
Body doesn't `wear out` from use. Yes there are overuse injuries and overuse arthritis .
Aging related `wear out` has nothing do with use. Infact, opposite is often true. Its unfortunate that doctors refer to age related joint issues as 'wear and tear' issues.
Octopuses trigger rapid aging after giving birth from their “optic gland,” which “undergoes dramatic changes to produce more pregnenolone and progesterone, maternal cholestanoids, and 7-DHC during the stages of decline” [1]. (”Some females in captivity even seem to intentionally speed along the death spiral, banging into the sides of the tank, tearing off pieces of skin or eating the tips of their own tentacles” [2].) When the optic gland was removed, the affected females “abandoned their eggs, resumed feeding, and some even mated again.”
Leading theories include octopuses being “cannibals” having evolved “a biologically programmed death spiral may be a way to keep mothers from eating their young.” Alternatively, octopuses are close to biologically immortal, “so eliminating hungry adults keeps the octopus ecosystem from being dominated by a few massive” members.
TL; DR Programmed death is biologically precedents. There is evidence it is at work in most animals, including humans.
[1] https://news.uchicago.edu/story/what-causes-octopus-death-sp...
[2] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180925140402.h...
Couldn't we just adopt healthier, proportional, longer lived dogs? Or do people just really want to see how miserable a 15 year old Great Dane would be?
I've had a few large dogs of various breeds and there is a wide spectrum.
I understand one may really like its dog/cat/... but, why not just accept time passes ?
(I've lost a goldfish and I was not happy, proper burial helped a lot)
Humanity is eventually going to be able to extend lifespans indefinitely. Whether that happens sooner or later depends on how many people decide not to go gentle into that good night.
Can you prove that ? Or is it just wishful thinking ?
But the OPs comment was, to me at least, as absurd as if I said to someone “I don’t think you should worry so much about saving your daughter’s life. When I lost my dog, I was sad, but I got over it.”
These are not in the same category to most people, and you can’t assume your experience of losing a dog gives you insight into losing a child. Same goes with dog -> goldfish.
If you were enslaved with no expectation of freedom, you'd do your best to make peace with it just to survive. But you might also spend your free time secretly trying to find a way out.
If not, there really should be. I would be a customer.
Thinking this was familiar, I saw it on local news tv on Nov 30
https://globalnews.ca/news/10139206/new-drug-big-dogs-longer...
I do think it's harder to manage a dog's existence in a crowded city's parks.
People love their dogs and are willing to spend large amounts of money on them - how do you prevent people from selling them snake oil?
On top of that, we're talking about the first-ever drug approved solely for the purpose of life extension - yes it's in dogs, but it's a topic being heavily pursued in humans as well. While the approach taken here isn't directly relevant to people, one can imagine that developing this class of drugs in animals could lead to useful information on how to do so in humans, but only if there's actual evidence to prove their validitiy.
And given the fact that people have the legal authority to euthanize their pets on demand, it seems pretty silly that we are spending millions of dollars in taxpayer money ensuring they don't get fed snake oil.
Wouldn’t we learn a lot more about the effects of these experimental treatments if we allowed the willing to take them voluntarily?
In the case of life-extension treatments, no - we would learn much less if we allowed people to give them to their pets voluntarily.
The problem is that what you're testing for is very difficult to measure, so you need a well-run study like the one that Loyal has done here. If people just give them to their dogs without the structure of a trial, you'll never get the kind of data you need to conclusive prove life-extending effects, and because companies can now sell without such a trial, you eliminate the incentives to invest the time, money and effort into that kind of a trial.
Disagree. Public money is subject to the public process, which includes debating about and voting on how resources are spent. Don't shout down people who are participating in the process.
Let’s leave aside the fact that humans value companion animals such that they might want to spend government resources on keeping them healthy for longer. And also the fact that certain other animals are important food sources which make up a sizable chunk of the economy.
Do you think that if the government no longer had to spend resources on animal drugs that all of those resources would stay at the FDA and be diverted to human drugs?
The cynic in me thinks that the speed of the process is the independent variable here. And that resources will be added or subtracted to maintain roughly that same speed and/or rigor.