Helping Dogs and Their Pawrents Live Healthier, Longer

Summary

Short Wave: Helping Dogs and Their Pawrents Live Healthier, Longer

Hosted by Regina Barber | Released on June 9, 2025

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Introduction

In the June 9, 2025 episode of NPR's Short Wave, hosts Emily Kwong and Regina Barber delve into the intriguing realm of canine health and longevity. Titled "Helping Dogs and Their Pawrents Live Healthier, Longer," the episode spotlights the groundbreaking Dog Aging Project led by veterinarian and data analyst Audrey Ruppel from Virginia Tech. This initiative seeks to bridge the significant knowledge gap surrounding the health, disease trends, and lifespans of dogs in the United States.

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The Knowledge Gap in Canine Populations

Regina Barber opens the discussion by highlighting a surprising fact: while human, livestock, and wildlife populations are meticulously counted and studied in the U.S., pet populations, particularly dogs, remain largely undocumented.

Regina Barber (00:12): "But for pets, not so much."

Audrey Ruppel underscores the implications of this gap:

Audrey Ruppel (00:34): "We have no idea how many dogs live in the United States."

Ruppel explains that the absence of comprehensive data hampers understanding of health and disease trends in dogs, making it challenging to determine factors that contribute to their longevity. This realization spurred the inception of the Dog Aging Project.

Audrey Ruppel (00:54): "The goal of the Dog Aging project is to help us understand what really makes a healthy lifespan for our dogs."

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Launching the Dog Aging Project

Initially perceived as a daunting endeavor, especially with its launch coinciding with the onset of the global pandemic in late 2019, the project swiftly surpassed expectations. What began with a target of 10,000 dogs rapidly expanded as dog owners found themselves more available to participate during lockdowns.

Audrey Ruppel (01:37): "We got to 30,000 dogs in just a few months and we're now at over 50,000 dogs enrolled in the project."

The project's expansive dataset aims to elucidate the factors that contribute to a healthy and long life in dogs and, by extension, offer insights into human health due to the shared environments and similar genetics between dogs and their owners.

Audrey Ruppel (02:12): "Dogs are actually a perfect species for us to study in order to really understand what happens for humans in terms of the environmental exposures and also how our genes predispose us to health and disease."

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Key Findings from the Dog Aging Project

Over five years, the Dog Aging Project has unearthed several significant insights:

1. Breed Distribution and Diets

   • The dog population within the project mirrors the national distribution: approximately 50% purebred and 50% mixed breeds.
   • Dietary habits reveal that about 85% of participating dogs are fed commercial kibble, while the remaining 15% enjoy a variety of diets, including home-prepared, fresh frozen, and freeze-dried options.

   Audrey Ruppel (04:22): "About 85% of the dogs in our study are being fed a commercially prepared kibble diet."

2. Accuracy of Breed Identification

   • Dog owners exhibit remarkable accuracy in identifying their dogs' breeds, even among mixed breeds. This accuracy was confirmed through genomic testing of approximately a thousand dogs, where owner-reported breeds closely matched genetic results.

   Audrey Ruppel (05:14): "Dog owners were really, really close. Even with mixed breed dogs that had been adopted from shelter type situations, they were pretty close with like what? The mix was pretty close."

3. Lifespan Anomalies in Dogs

   • Contrary to trends observed in other mammals, larger dog breeds tend to have shorter lifespans than their smaller counterparts—a phenomenon yet to be fully understood.

   Regina Barber (06:14): "So, but, so one question I've also thought about, like, again, not a dog owner, but I used to use the dog analogy for talking about stars."

   Audrey Ruppel (06:40): "We still do not know why that happens, but we do know that that is an anomaly when you think about mammals."

Ruppel suggests potential links to growth hormones and genetics but emphasizes that the exact causes remain unidentified.

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Addressing Information Gaps

The project's vast and diverse dataset is poised to answer previously unanswerable questions about dog health. Ruppel points out that existing data sources are often flawed, especially concerning less common breeds, making it difficult to assess breed-specific health risks accurately.

Audrey Ruppel (07:27): "We don't know what we don't know."

By conducting large-scale population-based studies, the Dog Aging Project aims to uncover genetic and environmental factors influencing canine health, thereby providing a more nuanced understanding of breed predispositions and disease mechanisms.

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Innovative Approaches: Repurposing Human Drugs for Dogs

A notable aspect of the project is its exploration of repurposing human medications to enhance canine health. Specifically, the team is investigating the effects of rapamycin—a drug typically used for immune suppression—at much lower doses to potentially slow cellular aging.

Audrey Ruppel (08:58): "We're actually trying to see if it can actually slow aging at a cellular level."

By inhibiting the MTOR pathway, which is associated with aging, rapamycin could extend the health span of dogs, allowing for better cardiac function and improved physical capabilities without necessarily extending lifespan directly.

Audrey Ruppel (09:10): "So it's not that we're trying to create a longer lifespan, it's that we're trying to create better health while dogs are still alive."

The team is carefully monitoring potential side effects, ensuring that immune function remains uncompromised despite the drug's immune-suppressing origins.

Audrey Ruppel (10:27): "We're using it at a much lower dose, and we are certainly monitoring for other health outcomes along the way."

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Implications for Human Health

Ruppel envisions the Dog Aging Project as a sentinel initiative, where dogs serve as early indicators of environmental health threats that could also impact humans. Drawing parallels to historical examples like canaries in coal mines and fish affected by BPA, the project leverages the shorter lifespans of dogs to detect and understand health risks more rapidly.

Audrey Ruppel (10:50): "Dogs are essentially serving as a sentinel for health threats for human populations."

By analyzing comprehensive life exposure data and corresponding health outcomes in dogs, researchers can identify potential environmental hazards and lifestyle factors that may also be relevant to human health.

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Future Directions and Goals

Looking ahead, Ruppel aims to refine the "recipe" for a long, healthy life for dogs, which could simultaneously inform strategies to enhance human health and longevity. A major focus is on identifying and mitigating silent environmental threats—chemicals and other factors within households that may negatively impact health.

Audrey Ruppel (12:50): "I do think that learning those keys in the dog population will help us in terms of figuring out what's the right combination of things for the human population as well."

Ruppel expresses an openness to expanding similar studies to other pets, humorously addressing the idea of a Cat Aging Project.

Audrey Ruppel (13:47): "I have no plans to launch a cat aging project, but would be more than happy to help anyone who's interested in launching such an endeavor."

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Conclusion

The Dog Aging Project represents a pioneering effort to comprehensively understand canine health and longevity through large-scale data collection and innovative research methods. By bridging the knowledge gap in dog populations, the project not only aims to enhance the lives of dogs and their owners but also aspires to yield insights that could benefit human health. As the project continues to grow, its findings promise to illuminate the intricate connections between genetics, environment, and well-being across species.

For more information or to enroll your dog in the study, visit dogagingproject.org.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Regina Barber (00:34): “We have no idea how many dogs live in the United States.”
• Audrey Ruppel (00:54): “The goal of the Dog Aging project is to help us understand what really makes a healthy lifespan for our dogs.”
• Audrey Ruppel (04:22): “About 85% of the dogs in our study are being fed a commercially prepared kibble diet.”
• Audrey Ruppel (05:14): “Dog owners were really, really close. Even with mixed breed dogs that had been adopted from shelter type situations, they were pretty close with like what? The mix was pretty close.”
• Audrey Ruppel (06:40): “We still do not know why that happens, but we do know that that is an anomaly when you think about mammals.”
• Audrey Ruppel (08:58): “We're actually trying to see if it can actually slow aging at a cellular level.”
• Audrey Ruppel (10:50): “Dogs are essentially serving as a sentinel for health threats for human populations.”
• Audrey Ruppel (12:50): “I do think that learning those keys in the dog population will help us in terms of figuring out what's the right combination of things for the human population as well.”

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Learn More

To explore the Dog Aging Project further or to participate, visit dogagingproject.org. Stay updated with the latest episodes of Short Wave by following NPR on your preferred podcast platform.

Transcript

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[Regina Barber]

You're listening to Short Wave from npr. In the United States, we count how many humans live in our country. We also know how much livestock like cows, chickens and pigs are here. And we even have estimates for wildlife populations like birds and bears. But for pets, not so much.

[Audrey Ruppel]

We have no idea how many dogs live in the United States.

[Regina Barber]

That's Audrey Ruppel, a veterinarian and data analyst at Virginia Tech. She says that not knowing how many dogs there are means we have a huge knowledge gap on health and disease trends and even how long dogs live. She's trying to change that.

[Audrey Ruppel]

The goal of the Dog Aging project is to help us understand what really makes a healthy lifespan for our dogs.

[Regina Barber]

And for Audrey, health and lifespan, they're really two different things that both need care and attention. Even if it's easy to take that first word, health, for granted.

[Audrey Ruppel]

I think that for all of us when we talk about wanting our dogs to live a long lifespan, what we really mean is we want our dogs to live along healthy lifespan. And I think that we don't often differentiate between those things.

[Regina Barber]

But with the Dog Aging Project, she and other researchers can start to by collecting lots of health and aging info from dogs all over the country, which started as a lofty goal. Initially, the project felt like a pipe dream.

[Audrey Ruppel]

We had a goal of getting to 10,000 dogs and we were concerned it would take us too long to do that.

[Regina Barber]

Concerned because they launched the project at the end of 2019, right into the.

[Audrey Ruppel]

Beginning of a global pandemic.

[Regina Barber]

Which turned out to be a time when a lot of folks were at home with their dogs with less to do.

[Audrey Ruppel]

So we got to 30,000 dogs in just a few months and we're now at over 50,000 dogs enrolled in the project.

[Regina Barber]

Audrey says this ongoing project will help researchers better understand what makes a dog live a healthy long life and also what that says about the health of.

[Audrey Ruppel]

Their human companions being because of this really co evolved experience where we both have similar genetics but we also have the same environments. Dogs are actually a perfect species for us to study in order to really understand what happens for humans in terms of the environmental exposures and also how our genes predispose us to health and disease.

[Regina Barber]

Today on the show Quality of Life, what researchers have learned so far from the Dog Aging project, how this could inform human health. Plus could a pill one day increase dogs lifespans? I'm Regina Barber. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from npr.

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[Regina Barber]

So Audrey, for the Dog Aging Project, your team gets owners to fill out surveys of their dog's health, their lifestyle, like where they're living, what they're exposed to, stuff like that. And you've been doing this for five years now. What have you learned so far?

[Audrey Ruppel]

Oh gosh, we've learned a lot. One thing that we've learned is that our dog population, the Dog Aging Project, mimics what we think is the true population of dogs in the US so about 50% of the dogs are purebred and 50% of the dogs are mixed breed dogs. We have dogs of all ages, shapes and sizes, and we've learned lots of things about them. About 85% of the dogs in our study are being fed a commercially prepared kibble diet. But there's a lot of diversity in terms of the 15% of dogs that are eating other things. And so those are home prepared diets, fresh frozen diets, freeze dried diets, like all kinds of different things. We've also learned that dog owners are really good at reporting the breed of their dog. Whether it's a single breed or mixed breed dog, they're able to identify that pretty accurately.

[Regina Barber]

How do you know? Do you quality check that? Like, how do you know?

[Audrey Ruppel]

We did genomic testing on about a thousand of the dogs in the Dog Aging Project and we asked owners what dog breed they thought that they had. And dog owners were really, really close. Even with mixed breed dogs that had been adopted from shelter type situations, they.

[Regina Barber]

Were pretty close with like what? The mix was pretty close.

[Audrey Ruppel]

Well, it kind of makes sense because our dog breeds were really created by humans. And we created those breeds based on what dogs looked like. We wanted tall dogs or skinny dogs or long dogs. And so because of that, we ended up with a pretty succinct way of identifying dogs based upon what they look like.

[Regina Barber]

And cat owners. They're like, my cat is orange.

[Audrey Ruppel]

Yes.

[Regina Barber]

It's like, it's not the same.

[Audrey Ruppel]

It's actually a real difference.

[Regina Barber]

Cause we didn't breed cats to be a certain way.

[Audrey Ruppel]

So I don't think cats would allow that kind of behavior. Whereas dogs seem to be more amenable.

[Regina Barber]

So, but, so one question I've also thought about, like, again, not a dog owner, but I used to use the dog analogy for talking about stars. So small stars actually live a really long time and large stars live a shorter life. And I'd be like, like dogs. We don't actually know why that is true, Right. I thought we did. But is, is that true? We don't really know why larger dogs live shorter lives than smaller dogs.

[Audrey Ruppel]

That is correct. We still do not know why that happens, but we do know that that is an anomaly when you think about mammals. That is typically the larger the mammal, the larger their lifespan. So like an elephant would live a longer lifespan than would a cat, but with dogs it's the exact opposite. And it's just as you said, the bigger they are, the shorter their lifespan.

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Wow.

[Regina Barber]

We don't have any clue.

[Audrey Ruppel]

We do have some ideas and we do think that it might be related to things like, you know, growth hormone and those types of things. And there's some, there's obviously a genetic component to that. But no, we haven't identified like the gene that is responsible for why that happens.

[Regina Barber]

Fascinating. Okay, so what are you trying to answer with this, like, large data set? Like, what are the info gaps you're trying to fill in?

[Audrey Ruppel]

Well, I think that the reality is we don't know what we don't know. And one of the things that we think that we know about dogs are things like breed predispositions. Like, we think that we understand which breeds are more prone to get certain diseases as compared to other breeds of dogs. But all of that knowledge has been based on those data sources that are flawed for lots of different ways.

[Regina Barber]

Wow.

[Audrey Ruppel]

And so it's really hard to know things like, for instance, about breeds that are not very common, those types of dogs. We would need to have large populations of them in order to, to get information about them. And so until we do these large population based studies, there's a lot of breeds of dogs that would just be. They would fall through the cracks. There are certainly things that I do think that we know with some high degree of certainty. We have done genomic studies in dogs where we've been able to find, like, precursors, genetic precursors to disease, and we've done large EPI studies where we've actually been able to find some environmental threats that we think can lead to disease outcomes in dogs. But we've never had a population as large and diverse as the one that we have in the dog aging project. So this is really an opportunity for us to kind of, you know, pull the. Pull the lid off of a lot of these questions that we haven't been able to answer previously.

[Regina Barber]

So part of the dog aging project, I've learned, is that you're repurposing a human drug for dogs. Like, what is this pill? And like, what are you looking at?

[Audrey Ruppel]

Yes, so it is typically used for immune suppression, but at a lower dose, which is a much lower dose, obviously, that we're using testing in dog populations. We're actually trying to see if it can actually slow aging at a cellular level. So the pill that we're talking about is called rapamycin, and it actually knocks out a pathway called the MTOR pathway. So it truly impacts the cellular. Impacts the body at a cellular level. Wow. And the question is, if we knock out this pathway, which is associated with aging, can we slow aging in a way that actually increases health span? So it's not that we're trying to create a longer lifespan, it's that we're trying to create better health while dogs are still alive. So looking at things like cardiac output, output and saying, do their hearts function better? Are they able to do aerobic exercise at a better those types of outcomes, Rather than looking at necessarily longevity, which of course, we're still measuring, and we are looking at if we increase health span, does that serendipitously also then increase lifespan? So rather than trying to increase lifespan first and hope that healthspan catches up, can we increase healthspan and therefore live.

[Regina Barber]

A longer life and this doesn't affect their immune system? Because I would think that if you suppress an immune system, you would actually do the opposite of helping with health.

[Sponsor Message]

Right?

[Audrey Ruppel]

Well, we're using it at a much lower dose, and we are certainly monitoring for other health outcomes along the way.

[Regina Barber]

Okay, so let's get back to, like, a big picture here. Like, so we're studying all these dogs health. We have now a better database that hopefully can grow. What can that do for human health? And the study of, like, healthy and our lifespan also have a longer health span.

[Audrey Ruppel]

Yeah. So I think of it as a sentinel project, and that dogs are essentially serving as a sentinel for health threats for human populations. So that's kind of like. We didn't know that BPA was a problem until we noticed BPA was affecting fish and streams. And then we figured out that this additive in our plastics was a problem not just for fish, but also for humans. Or like, we used to use canaries in coal mines.

[Regina Barber]

I was gonna say like a canary in a coal mine. Is that what you mean by sentinel? I've never actually used that word as sentinel.

[Audrey Ruppel]

Yeah. So I think of. I think of it. It is like the canary in the coal mine. The only difference is, is that our dogs aren't sacrificial. Canaries were used in a very sacrificial way. And we certainly don't mean that for our dogs because it's that their lifespan is shorter, and therefore their health outcomes happen more rapidly. Because of that, we're able to detect threats in them faster than we can in human populations. With our dog populations. When you think about five years of the dog aging project, that's half of the lifespan for a lot of the dogs that are in the project. So we're actually able to kind of get this whole life exposure information or the exposome information, and then get their health outcomes as well. For instance, if we look at cancer outcomes in these dogs and then we have all of this information about their life, we can interrogate these data to determine were there risks that they were exposed to? Were there things in their environments? Did they eat the wrong types of food? Did they not get enough exercise? We kind of get these clues as to what might have actually led to the development of those health outcomes, and then it can help us to understand better threats that might also impact our human health outcomes.

[Regina Barber]

Yeah, I like that. What do you hope to then learn in the years and decades to come, you know, about dog health, about human health? Like, what are your next steps?

[Audrey Ruppel]

Well, ultimately, I would really like to know what the right recipe is for a long, healthy life for our dog companions. I would like for us to figure out, like, what are the things that we can do to optimize health within that species? I do think that learning those keys in the dog population will help us in terms of figuring out what's the right combination of things for the human population as well. Really, what I'm focused on right now are getting better data around the environmental exposures. What are the silent, silent threats that we are living with. You know, what are the chemicals in our environment? Are there things that we should be removing from our households? Are there things we should be adding? So I'm really starting to delve into that piece and just trying to figure out what are the things that we can change to make our lives better.

[Regina Barber]

And one last very important question, like when are you launching the Cat Aging Project?

[Audrey Ruppel]

So I have no plans to launch a cat aging project, but would be more than happy to help anyone who's interested in launching such an endeavor.

[Regina Barber]

That's quite all right. I will. You know, we'll find those people. Don't worry. Thank you, Audrey, so much for talking to us about the dog gauging project.

[Audrey Ruppel]

Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure.

[Regina Barber]

You can learn more about this project, including how to enroll your own dog, by visiting dogagingproject.org or check our show notes. If you like this episode, make sure you never miss a new one by following us on whatever podcasting platform you're listening from. And if you have a science question you'd like us to investigate, send us an [e-mail] this episode was produced by Burleigh McCoy, edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez, and fact checked by Tyler Jones. The audio engineer was Kwesi Lee, Bette Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is our senior Vice President of Podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Shortwave, the Science Podcast from N.

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