Check out the new, accurate way to calculate your dog’s age relative to human years (it’s no longer 7=1)

By on December 19, 2019

We’re all familiar with the dog year as an equal to seven human years idea, yes? There’s a new way to calculate dog age that might be more accurate.

“Simply put,” a recent NPR article said, “compared with humans, dogs age very quickly at first, but then their aging slows down, a lot.” An example: a two-year-old dog is equivalent to a 42-year-old human. At four years, a dog is about 53 in human years. A one-year-old dog’s DNA is pretty similar to a 30-year-old human. Weird, but in molecular terms, more accurate.

Also in the article, this pretty technical language:

“Humans and dogs have DNA that basically doesn’t change over the course of life and 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…

“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.”

Researchers took DNA from over a hundred dogs and eventually arrived at a new dog age calculator, which can be found here.

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