Scientists have come up with a better way to convert your dog’s age to human years | Business - The Washington Post

Christopher Ingraham, Reporter covering all things data explains, My dog Winston, a 1-year-old pit bull mix, is a sleek, muscular beast at the peak of his physical abilities. 

Photo: Meritt Thomas on Unsplash

According to the well-known rule by which we convert one dog year into seven human years, Winston is about the same developmental age as my 6-year-old twins. But in contrast to Winston’s athleticism, the twins are clumsy, cuddly little goofballs with a lot of growing up to do.

Now, new research by a team of geneticists and biologists at the University of California, San Diego and elsewhere explains the discrepancy. The scientists say they’ve devised a far more accurate formula for the human-canine conversion — one that front-loads the aging process for dogs and accounts for such variables as breed size — by boring into the effects of aging on their respective DNAs...

Plot the two DNA profiles against each other and you get a curve showing the relationship between dog years and human years. Since Labrador retrievers are perhaps the most universally loved breed of dog, Ideker and the team illustrated their findings using the human equivalent: Tom Hanks.

Photo: Chart via Wang et al., 2019

According to the DNA analysis, a 1-year-old Lab is equivalent to a “Big”-era Hanks, while a 4-year-old mirrors the actor’s star turn in “The Da Vinci Code.” By age 9, a Lab has obtained the approximate gravitas of Hanks starring as Ben Bradlee in “The Post.”
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Additional resources
Quantitative translation of dog-to-human aging by conserved remodeling of epigenetic networks
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/829192 

Source: The Washington Post