Abstract
Aging research has experienced a burst of scientific efforts in the last decades as the growing ratio of elderly people has begun to pose an increased burden on the healthcare and pension systems of developed countries. Although many breakthroughs have been reported in understanding the cellular mechanisms of aging, the intrinsic and extrinsic factors that contribute to senescence on higher biological levels are still barely understood. The dog, Canis familiaris, has already served as a valuable model of human physiology and disease. The possible role the dog could play in aging research is still an open question, although utilization of dogs may hold great promises as they naturally develop age-related cognitive decline, with behavioral and histological characteristics very similar to those of humans. In this regard, family dogs may possess unmatched potentials as models for investigations on the complex interactions between environmental, behavioral, and genetic factors that determine the course of aging. In this review, we summarize the known genetic pathways in aging and their relevance in dogs, putting emphasis on the yet barely described nature of certain aging pathways in canines. Reasons for highlighting the dog as a future aging and gerontology model are also discussed, ranging from its unique evolutionary path shared with humans, its social skills, and the fact that family dogs live together with their owners, and are being exposed to the same environmental effects.
Highlights
Dogs (Canis familiaris) are special in the animal kingdom in many aspects
We provide an overview of the evolutionary conserved biological mechanisms that contribute to aging, following the classification system proposed by LópezOtín et al, 2013, and we summarize current knowledge about these pathways in dogs
A research group that investigated the hippocampi of donated pet dogs from various breeds (Ghi et al, 2009) reported an age-related increase in Hsp90 levels. This finding could indicate both a compensatory response to the accumulation of damaged proteins and a more direct link between Hsp90 and age-related neural decline in dogs, as it was suggested in humans, where Hsp90 was implicated as a factor that may drive spreading of taupathy (Dickey et al, 2007; Luo et al, 2007)
Summary
Dogs (Canis familiaris) are special in the animal kingdom in many aspects. Being the oldest domesticated species, they accompany humans for approximately 15,000–100,000 years (estimates depend on the different approaches used to study their origin; see Vila, 1997; Larson et al, 2012; Thalmann et al, 2013; Frantz et al, 2016; Botigué et al, 2017). The genes and their functions linked to human age-related neurodegeneration may be fundamentally different from their homologs found in model organisms, or even missing from other species (Bitar and Barry, 2017).
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