What can we learn from old dogs? | David Waters | TEDxPurdueU

no problem terrible question can the oldest living dogs teach us something important about the process of discovery I believe they can and that's why I'm up here on this stage today but 40 days ago I was in Homer Alaska visiting this dog Kiri on day one of the old gry muzzle tour a 40-day scientific exped Edition cross country where I studied the oldest living dogs in the United States in their homes why would we study these dogs so carefully because our goal is to better understand and unlock the secrets of highly successful aging and cancer

resistance in both pets and people and by the way Kiri is the oldest dog that I met on my tour and as a 15 and A2 year-old Rottweiler she's physiologically equivalent to a 100 16-year-old woman so here I am up on the stage day 40 upright barely but I'm feeling your energy so I'm prepared to tell you some stories and there are so many stories to tell what will I tell you about my scientific Expedition well perhaps I'll tell you about some of the words that were in my eyes during my trip road signs that

I encountered in the Six States and 18 interstate highways I traveled ah Alaska the threat of avalanche ah Oklahoma apparently in Oklahoma it's important to remind motorists that you shouldn't drive fast in areas where there's no visibility and something might be on fire and then finally in the mountains of West Virginia you see these types of words and and now I love West Virginia but you might get the impression why it's difficult for a traveler to find rest there but we began studying Rottweilers Aging in Rottweilers in 1999 and that's when we collected a vast

amount of medical and health information on over 800 dogs living in the United States and Canada and it was that time that we got the first glimpse of this tiny group of 21 Rottweilers who had lived to the age of 13 which would be equivalent to a 100-year old person and we know Rottweilers are a Cancer prone breed but guess what these 21 exceptionally long lived dogs were cancer resistant so we knew right away we needed to study them more carefully and that's why the Murphy Foundation Center for exceptional longevity studies then began the first

systematic study of the oldest living dogs in the United States starting with Rottweilers now what is the advantage of studying the oldest living dogs as oppos as opposed to oldest living people well first of all you can dress them up here's Kiri from Alaska last Halloween and she's dressed up as a sheep with Little Bow Peep and and in my experience uh you find very few great grandmas that get jazzed up about Halloween anymore but 100-year-old Rottweilers will very readily work for Treats but on a serious note it's important to study these dogs because we

think these dogs hold the keys to some important breakthroughs in cancer resistance and that's because of our autopsy findings and here's what we've learned we know that Rottweilers are a cancer-prone breed if a Rottweiler dies with usual longevity which is about eight or 9 years of age cancer is the cause of death 80% of the time but if these dogs live to be a 100 then cancer is only the cause of death in 25% of the exceptionally long live rotes but what we've discovered at autopsy is more than 95% of these exceptionally longlived dogs are

actually harboring cancer at the time of autopsy sometimes two three four independent cancers I didn't say harboring bone cancer that spread to four different organs I said four different kinds of cancer holy crap I just told you that the oldest living Rottweilers have figured out what every Cancer scientist wants to figure out how do you transform lethal cancer to a non-lethal nuisance I say let's make cancer like athletes foot we'll just walk around with a bit of it but there's a second lesson there's a second lesson that the oldest old rodes want to teach us

and it has to do with stress and aging three weeks ago on my tour I gave a lecture at the University of Kentucky and it was called generating scientific hypothesis from the living room and what I was trying to get across to these young scientists in training was that instead of being stranded in the laboratory they needed to get out and make firsthand observations if you want to innovate how children learn you don't go back to your apartment and read a book on intelligence you get your butt in a classroom and You observe firsthand how

children learn so when I visit these dogs in their homes I spend about four hours studying them I do a detailed physical examination including neurologic exam and I ask many many questions questions and during my visits I'll ask the owner so do loud noises like gunshot or thunderstorm stress your dog the answer is usually no how about the trip to the veterinarian's office is that stressful the answer no how about strange people in the household no okay what is stressful to your dog and often times the owners have to think a long time and finally

I remember one owner that came up with the reply I think he's bothered by hot air balloons okay so it might be it might be intuitive that the most highly successfully aging organisms have figured out some positive way of dealing with stress but could we study the biology behind it and the prevailing notion about aging and stress goes something like this as as we age we get an increase in the levels of stress hormone cortisol in our blood if you're a dog a baboon a human and that pretty much takes care of everybody in the

audience today as you grow older you have increased levels of stress hormone and that can do nasty things like suppress the immune system decrease cognitive function and also accelerate tumor growth so so what we wanted to do was say we went into the living room and we said do these oldest old dogs that seem to handle stress so well do you really think that they have elevated levels of stress hormone conventional wisdom would say they're ancient dogs they should have very high cortisol levels so what did we do we measured for the first time cortisol

levels in the oldest living dogs we measured cortisol in 28 dogs Nationwide and this is no easy trick because at any given time there's about 15 of these dogs that are alive in the United States and they're sprinkled across the country so how many of the 28 oldest old dogs do you think had elevated cortisol the answer is none well I think that deserves a second reply uh none none so now here's the second holy crap of the talk holy crap the the most highly successfully aging Rott Wilds have figured out a way to sidestep

the age related increase in cortisol more importantly 40% of the dogs are walking around with low levels of cortisol okay you say that that makes a little bit sense sense because these are ancient dogs and maybe their adrenal glands that produce cortisol are wearing out but we did something very clever in our study we challenged each of these dogs by injecting them with a small amount of the pituitary hormone act which triggers cortisol release and what did we find all of these dogs that are walking around with low cortisol maintain a youthful response to challenge

if you wanted to win a one 100-year race you would not Sprint it would you you would cool down the machine but you would also want to retain a youthful response to challenge and that's what these guys have figured out and we're calling this low cortisol youthful response retain situation which has never been reported before the Adaptive Secret adaptive meaning advantageous to the organism secret which comes from the Latin meaning we don't have any freaking idea how the dogs are doing this but if my story ended there we would miss out on the most important

message of all and that is to examine the meta message here and this is the idea that so eloquently stated by the general semanticist Wendel Johnson years ago so the take-home lesson for you all is that to be discovers get the words out of your eyes and what Johnson meant by that and what I believe strongly is that before you let the classifications the categories and the facts that have been poured into your head constrain your way of thinking limit the way you see things you need to get out and make firsthand observations you need

to explore the world firsthand get the words out of your eyes look at my story about stress and aging could we have identified an old but successfully aging population of individuals that Sid stepped High cortisol yes only if we got the words out of our eyes that said cortisol is an inextricable obligate part of aging we had to get out of the laboratory and into the living room to discover to make sure progress in a world of uncertainty and I'm going to close now with a story that is told of the Nobel prizewinning physicist Richard

feineman feineman was at a dinner party one evening and a lady came up to him and said Mr Fineman I don't know how you you do it as a physicist and a scientist how do you deal with all the uncertainty and fan leaned over and replied to the woman ma'am it's the only World we've got so get out there in that uncertain world you too can be a discover you just have to get the words out of your eyes thank you