Researchers with the Dog Aging Project at Texas A&M University found that patterns of small molecules circulating in dogs' blood are linked to earlier or later death in ways strikingly similar to patterns already identified in people. About 40% of these metabolites, chemical byproducts of normal metabolism, inflammation and cellular stress, change with age.
Rather than looking at single molecules, the team analyzed broad "metabolic fingerprints" across thousands of metabolites and compared them against five large published human mortality studies using similar methods. The overlap was strong enough that the same biological signals predicting risk in humans also showed up in dogs.
"The molecules that are risky for dogs or protective against a sooner death are very similar to those in people, showing that we share important features of aging biology," said Dr. Kate Creevy of the Dog Aging Project. Because dogs live an average of 12-13 years, share human households and environments, and now show these same biological fingerprints, researchers say they could become a faster, more relevant model for aging research than lab mice. The Dog Aging Project has enrolled more than 52,000 pet dogs as of December 2025.