Daniel Promislow, UW Biology Professor, is quoted in an article in HealthDay News on the Dog Aging Project, which aims to understand why canines tend to age at vastly different rates and why some breeds fall prey to different illnesses.

Joshua Akey admits he didn't care much for dogs in his youth.

"My wife, who grew up with dogs, convinced me that we should get a dog our first year in graduate school. I very begrudgingly agreed, and have been a dog person ever since," said Akey, a professor with Princeton University's Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics.

Akey's turnaround as a dog lover is impressive because he's now part of a nationwide research effort called the Dog Aging Project, which aims to help dogs live longer.

What's more, he's even enrolled his own 1-year-old purebred Labrador, Zoey, as one of the participants.

With 32,000 dogs already signed up to the program's "pack," the Dog Aging Project intends to figure out why canines tend to age at vastly different rates and why some breeds fall prey to different illnesses.

"Dogs vary enormously in how long they live, and in the spectrum of diseases they're at risk of," said Daniel Promislow, a professor of biology, laboratory medicine and pathology at the University of Washington in Seattle.

"Some breeds get cancer quite frequently, some rarely get cancer, some have heart problems, other breeds never get heart problems. The primary goal of our project is to understand why it is that dogs vary so much in how they age and how long they live," said Promislow, principal investigator for the project.

Everyone tends to think of "dog years" as roughly human years times seven, but it's not that simple, the researchers said.

Read the full story in HealthDay News. Related article in The Independent.