Want to know how old your dog is in human years? A new study states that calculating every dog year isn't equal to 7 human years.
That's because your dog ages differently than you.
Researchers at the University of California San Diego’s school of medicine said in a news release that a 1-year-old dog is similar to a 30-year-old person. But a 4-year-old pup is identical to a 52-year-old human.
"The formula is based on the changing patterns of methyl groups in dog and human genomes — how many of these chemical tags and where they’re located — as they age," researchers said in the release. "Since the two species don’t age at the same rate over their lifespans, it turns out it’s not a perfectly linear comparison, as the 1:7 years rule-of-thumb would suggest."
This graph formula, which was created from the study, will match up the age of your dog with the comparable human age.
Lead researcher Trey Ideker said that dogs that are younger age faster compared to humans.
“This makes sense when you think about it — after all, a nine-month-old dog can have puppies, so we already knew that the 1:7 ratio wasn’t an accurate measure of age," Ideker said.
For the new study, which was published in the journal Cell Systems, samples of blood from 105 Labrador retrievers were studied.
Researchers plan to study other dog breeds to see if their method holds up.
