Inside Science: Canine Sentinels

Merriam-Webster defines a sentinel as a person or group that watches over someone or something. If your dog goes bonkers when someone rings your doorbell, you are well aware that they are acting as a sentinel for your home.

But what if your furry companion was also a sentinel for your physical and social health and welfare as well?

In this article at Science.org, our Dog Aging Project team members Courtney Sexton and Audrey Ruple lay the framework for how our close relationships with canine companions can offer an opportunity to learn how the combined elements of the physical and social environment contribute to the quality of life for both people and dogs.

Although the canine life span is roughly six times shorter than that of humans, it is long enough to show the effects of potentially harmful exposures over time. Dogs can help researchers more rapidly assess how they tolerate environmental risk factors and how the same factors may be tolerated by people.

Dogs can help improve our understanding of, for example, the epidemiology of vector-borne pathogens (VBPs), the impacts of exposure to volatile organic compounds (VOCs), endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs), heavy-metal absorption, and even the effects of social adversity.

Studies of the prevalence and spread of VBPs in dogs offer distinct information that may help curb the spread of disease.

For both indoor and outside exposures, studies using noninvasive and inexpensive silicone tags on dogs and wristbands on people show that levels of exposure to many compounds and chemicals in the environment are comparable to those of humans, confirming dogs as ideal sentinels. (The Dog Aging Project has already piloted a study of these tags.)

As the authors note, where researchers are just beginning to scratch the ears of the canine sentinel is in capturing impacts of human social and financial adversity through measured effects on dogs. Identifying these social risk factors in dogs and assessing how they may alter aging, health, and even survival can help in finding ways to modify the environment, or exposome, to improve quality of life. (The Dog Aging Project has already begun looking at the relationship between dog walking and safe neighborhoods.)

You can read more about how the Dog Aging Project links health to environmental data here.

As health and aging research continues, it is important that investigators continue to examine veterinary medical data in the context of the physical and social environments. At the Dog Aging Project, we are looking forward to what our canine sentinels will teach us next about living healthier, longer, together.

Read the article here: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adl0426