A New Way To Calculate Your Dog's Age

Sadie, a black, Australian labradoodle, is 7 years old. The idea that she's 49 in human years isn't right. Researchers now say
she's closer to 62.
Peter Breslow/NPR

The old way to think about your dog's "human age" —

the age in actual years times seven — is wrong. And
researchers now have a new formula they think will
calculate your dog's age more accurately.

Simply put, compared with humans, dogs age very

quickly at first, but then their aging slows down, a lot.

Trey Ideker of the University of California, San Diego

was part of a team of researchers that looked at aging on
the molecular level.
Humans and dogs have DNA that basically doesn't
change over the course of life, Ideker says. However,
"we have these additional chemical marks, called
epigenetic marks. The particular epigenetic mark that has
turned out to be pretty important for the study of age is
called methylation," he says.

"It's basically a wrinkle on your genome. So you have

DNA that does not change, but then you have these
additional marks that do change as you age. And they
change in a very predictable way, so that you can use the
pattern of marks to read out your age."

The comparison of humans and dogs was made easier

because they both often live in similar environments and
get similar access to health care.

For the study, they drew the blood of 104 Labrador

retrievers ages 4 weeks to 16 years.
"All I have to do is take dogs in a certain age group, like
in a 1-year-old age group, and look at what are the most
similar molecular profiles in the humans," Ideker says.
"And what ages those humans are. And it turns out that if
you do that for like a 1-year-old dog, you find that the
matching humans at the molecular profile level are
surprisingly old. They're about 30 years old."

Using a dog age calculator based on the research, a 2-

year-old dog is about 42 in human years. But a dog twice
as old, 4 years, is roughly equivalent to a 53-year-old
human. Double it again and an 8-year-old dog is only 64
in human age.
The researchers broke down their comparison by
developmental period:
"Juvenile refers to the period after infancy and before
puberty, 2-6 mos. in dogs, 1-12 yrs. in humans;

"Adolescent refers to the period from puberty to

completion of growth, 6 mos. to 2 yrs. in dogs,
approximately 12-25 yrs. in humans;

"Mature refers to the period from 2-7 yrs. in dogs and

25-50 yrs. in humans;

"Senior refers to the subsequent period until life

expectancy, 12 yrs. in dogs, 70 yrs. in humans."
For a more personal example, Sadie, NPR's Peter
Breslow's family dog, is 7 in human years. So the
Breslow family might have once thought of her as being
49, but now it looks like she's about 62.

But there's another way to think about it when we

humans get to be about that age.

"If I'm a 60-year-old," Ideker says, "wow, I'm a 7-year-

old dog!"