美国国家公共电台 NPR A New Way To Calculate Your Dog's Age（在线收听）

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

Our dogs grow old more quickly than we want. The old rule of paw, if you please, is that for every human year, a dog ages seven. Scientists have come up with a new way to calculate that. And their formula may be more accurate, but it doesn't do much to help our hopes.

Our Peter Breslow and a member of his family explain.

PETER BRESLOW, BYLINE: This is Sadie.

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BRESLOW: She's a black Australian labradoodle and pretty much the best dog in the world. She loves playing tug of war, is obsessed with bunnies and sometimes accompanies me on the harmonica.

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BRESLOW: And this is...

TREY IDEKER: Trey Ideker. I am a professor of genetics at UC San Diego School of Medicine.

BRESLOW: Professor Ideker was part of a team led by Dr. Tina Wang that helped come up with the new formula. He says that over the past decade or so, the old adage that a dog's age is human years times seven has been improved upon by molecular studies. The explanation is complicated.

IDEKER: Well, I - hopefully it's not dreadfully complicated.

BRESLOW: Let's start out with DNA, says Ideker, which basically doesn't change over the life of humans or dogs, who live in much the same environment as we do and get pretty good health care, too.

IDEKER: However, on top of that basic genetic code, that DNA, 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. And we can there get as complicated as you want, but I probably will stop.

BRESLOW: So he dumbed it down a bit.

IDEKER: 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.

BRESLOW: Scientists can use these molecular marks to read a human's age very accurately. So why not apply them to man's best friend? For the study, they drew the blood of 104 Labrador retrievers ages four weeks to 16 years.

IDEKER: Now all I have to do is take dogs in a certain age group, like in the 1-year-old age group, and look at what are the most similar molecular profiles in the humans 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.

BRESLOW: That's right. The bouncing, fluffy youngster happily gnawing the leg of your coffee table is really old enough to have a mortgage on a condo. But don't worry, the aging curve slows way down as your dog grows up. My dog Sadie is 7. So I have in front of me, at the smithsonian.com website, this handy-dandy calculator. So Sadie is 7. So we're thinking she's 49. But I punch in seven on the calculator, and it says Sadie is 62.1 years old, which - that's kind of a bummer.

IDEKER: So she's older than you thought. But what you'll see on that curve is she's currently aging at a much slower rate than 1 to 7. In the first couple of years of life, her molecular makeup progressed really quickly. And now she's slowing down. So maybe that's the glass-half-full version of this.

BRESLOW: As a matter of fact, when I punch in 10 - Sadie's age in three years - which would be 70 in traditional dog years, the curve says she's only 67.8 years old. And maybe, according to geneticists Trey Ideker, there's another way to think about all this if, say, you're a baby boomer.

IDEKER: Maybe the question isn't, why is my 7-year-old dog 60? But, if I'm a 60-year-old, wow, I'm a 7-year-old dog (laughter).

BRESLOW: Which is a pretty good thing. Right, Sadie?

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BRESLOW: Peter Breslow, NPR News.

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