The unrecognized potential of pet cats for studying aging and age-related diseases

Resilience to aging drives personalized intervention strategies for Alzheimer's disease

There has been little progress in reducing the incidence and mortality of Alzheimer's disease (AD). Prevention of onset, more accurate diagnostic tools, and prediction of health outcomes have all been identified as critical issues, but more and better basic research approaches are needed. The single greatest risk factor associated with AD is aging. It follows that if aging can be delayed, there should be an equivalent delay or even prevention of the onset of AD neuropathology. Therefore, targeting multiple pathways of aging would be a powerful way to enhance resilience to aging and slow or prevent the onset of AD neuropathology and dementia in a personalized manner. More effective and predictive animal models, such as the aging pet cat that spontaneously develops neuropathology similar to human AD patients, are necessary to help validate noninvasive and inexpensive biomarkers for identifying individuals at risk. Resilience to aging and its ability to delay or prevent the onset of age-related diseases should be the focus for preventing brain aging and enhancing resistance to AD.

The phenotype of aging in the dog: how aging impacts the health and well-being of dogs and their caregivers

Aging is the single most important cause of disease, disability, and death in adult dogs. Contrary to the common view of aging as a mysterious and inevitable natural event, it is more usefully understood as a set of complex but comprehensible biological processes that are highly conserved across species. Although the phenotypic expression of these processes is variable, there are consistent patterns both within and between species.

The purpose of this feature is to describe the patterns currently recognized in the physical and behavioral manifestations of aging in the dog and how these impact the health and welfare of companion dogs and their human caregivers. Important gaps in our knowledge of the canine aging phenotype will be identified, and current research efforts to better characterize aging in the dog will be discussed. This will help set the context for future efforts to develop clinical assessments and treatments to mitigate the negative impact of aging on dogs and humans.

Geropathology. An inside view of biological aging

The geropathology concept assumes all age-related lesions are relevant, which allows the ability to grade each lesion in an organ with a severity score resulting in a quantitative value. Because aging pet cats have similar age-related diseases as older humans, knowledge of histopathology occurring during aging would be invaluable to determine how age-related lesions progress with increasing age and the connection with comorbidities. The ability to use the severity of specific organ geropathology to predict biological aging would provide new approaches to study pathways of aging and their role in the development of age-related diseases in animal models.