Life Lines by Dr. Dolittle

Tag Archive for ‘dog’

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Best Friend or Stress Test? What Pets Do to Our Bodies

According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), 68% of households in the United States have a pet. Pets are thought to help people by decreasing stress and improving cardiovascular health. The NIH and Mar’s Corporation WALTHAM Centre for Pet Nutrition have teamed up to support research examining such questions, but the results have been mixed. According to Dr. Layla Esposito, who leads the NIH Human-Animal Interaction Research Program, people […]

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Physiology on the road: Celebrating physiology in Indiana

I am excited to announce that the Indiana Physiological Society, a chapter of the American Physiological Society, is hosting their annual meeting tomorrow! The event will take place at the University of Southern Indiana. The keynote address will be given by Dr. Thad Wilson, renowned professor of physiology and educator at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine. The conference also includes hands-on activities to improve teaching in physiology. It […]

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Happy ‘Love Your Pet Day’! Show your love by blinking

Do you ever find yourself intentionally blinking when you notice other people blinking? It’s as if we all have something stuck in our eyes at the same time. A new study published in Royal Society Open Science found that dogs appear to have the same reaction when seeing other dogs blink, which suggests that blinking may be a form of non-verbal canine communication. They also observed increased blinking in response […]

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Stress is contagious, even for dogs

Stress can make people pretty stinky. Humans have two main kinds of sweat glands. The eccrine glands produce sweat that we associate with exercise or warm weather – thin, watery and mostly odorless. We can thank apocrine glands for responding to stress by producing a thick fluid containing fats and proteins that skin bacteria love to digest. The result: stinky compounds somewhat reminiscent of vinegar or leeks. While humans may […]

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Dogs and humans have a lot in common when it comes to brain tumors

The most common type of naturally occurring brain tumor in humans and their feline as well as canine companions are meningiomas. The most aggressive form in humans is Meningioma C (MenG C). Unfortunately, there is currently no treatment available for MenG C and tumors often return even after radiation and surgery. Researchers were curious whether canine meningiomas were similar to human MenG C. In a newly published study, appearing in […]

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Gray wolves living within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone develop cancer resilience

Like humans, dogs are at risk of spontaneously developing cancer as they age. In fact, cancer is the leading cause of death for dogs (Gardner et al., 2016). Research suggests that dogs may better model cancer than rodents because the disease progression is similar to humans including involvement of the immune system, molecular pathways, variations between animals, tumor resistance to chemotherapy, and metastasis (Gardner et al., 2016). Thus, understanding and […]

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What do you get when you cross a dog and a fox?

Answer: A really cool hybrid (above). In 2021, someone brought a “dog” to a rehabilitation center in Vacaria, Brazil that had been injured by a car. However, upon further examination, they discovered she wasn’t a dog. She also preferred to eat rats over boring dog food. Disruptions of natural habitats in South America have led to increasing interactions between wild canids and domestic dogs. In this case, scientists discovered the […]

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Understanding aging in dogs may help us all live longer

“Dog Aging Project” was founded by aging researchers Drs. Matt Kaeberlein and Daniel Promislow (University of Washington) along with Kate Creevy who is currently the Chief Veterinary Officer. The goal of the project is to examine how the environment affects healthy aging and longevity in dogs and to test anti-aging treatments. This research has the potential to also impact how we understand environmental risk factors for aging in humans as […]

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EB 2022: Modeling human diseases and healthy aging

I sat through a very interesting session at this year’s Experimental Biology conference called, “The Power of Comparative Models for Accelerating Translational Healthspan Research: Underutilized Lab Animals, Companion Pets, Old World Monkeys, and Pumas.” While the title seems to capture the general idea of the symposium, I thought I would share a bit more information about the presenters and their exciting research. Dr. Karyn Hamilton from Colorado State University presented […]

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Preventing Atherosclerosis

Researchers have identified variants in the B4GALT1 gene of Amish people that are associated with low levels of LDL (i.e. “bad”) cholesterol and fibrinogen, a gene involved in blood clotting. In fact, people with variants in this gene are 35% less likely to be diagnosed with heart disease. When the variant was expressed in mice, the animals had similar decreases in LDL cholesterol and fibrinogen. Researchers are hoping to create […]

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