What starts off as a tragic statistic could actually end up saving dogs of the future – and their owners.
Golden retrievers, the UK’s most popular dog, are very susceptible to cancer – in fact, they have a 65% chance of dying from tumours.
But by looking into the cause of this terrible disease, scientists from the University of Carolina think they may have found the key to a long dog life.
When golden retrievers suffer from cancer, they tend not to live beyond 12 years. Those that don’t have the disease can often live to be 14, 15 or even 16 years old.
‘Almost two years is a significant difference in a dog’s life,’ said co-author Dr Danika Bannasch, from the university’s School of Veterinary Medicine.
‘Wouldn’t we all want our beloved pets to live another two years? Two years in goldens is about a 15-20% increase in lifespan, the equivalent of 12-14 years in humans.’
To dig into the breed’s DNA, the team studied blood samples from more than 300 golden retrievers – but instead of looking for a cancer-causing gene, they focused on what might be helping them live longer.
The results showed that dogs with certain variants of a particular gene, HER4, tended to live longer than those without – on average, 13.5 years compared to 11.6 years.
This suggests the HER4 gene can help combat cancer, enabling the goldies to live a longer, healthier life.
‘We assume that the majority of golden retrievers have a genetic predisposition to cancer,’ said co-corresponding author Professor Robert Rebhun. ‘But if some of them are living to be 14, 15 or 16, we thought there could be another genetic factor that is helping to mitigate the bad genes, and the gene that popped out for us is HER4.’
HER4 is closely related to a human gene well-known for making cancer cells grow quickly – meaning the findings may be important for people too, given they develop many of the same types of cancer as dogs.
‘If we find that this variant in HER4 is important either in the formation or progression of cancer in golden retrievers, or if it can actually modify a cancer risk in this cancer predisposed population, that may be something that can be used in future cancer studies in humans,’ said Professor Rebhun.
It is still early days for the research, with Dr Bannasch adding that the finding is still one small piece in the complex puzzle of what could cause goldens to get cancer.
However, the findings did suggest that HER4 had a bigger impact on longevity in female dogs, as it was shown to interact with reproductive hormones.
The next step, said Professor Rebhun, is to try to replicate the results with a much larger population of golden retrievers, and discover how the genetic variants impact how the gene works in the body.
The study is published in the journal GeroScience.
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