SEATTLE, Wash. — A new study finds dogs with canine cognitive dysfunction (CCD) have similar brain patterns to humans with Alzheimer’s disease, according to UW Medicine.
UW Medicine says that, with permission from the dogs’ owners, they looked at 24 dogs’ brains to track how CCD works. They also took blood from “about half of the dogs.”
“No one had mapped this neuropathology in dogs before — that’s what we set out to do,” co-author Dr. Caitlin Latimer said in a UW Newsroom release. “Yes, we know that we see similarities in how an aging dog behaves and how an aging human might behave, but until we actually looked at the brain and tried to identify and quantify what was there, we didn’t have a true picture of the disease.”
Dr. Latimer is an associate professor of Laboratory Medicine & Pathology at the University of Washington School of Medicine, and one of eight authors on the new study.
The study finds that, like humans, dogs with CCD also develop similar “irregular protein clumps in similar regions of their brain,” according to UW Medicine.
“I was surprised by how extensive the plaques were in some of these dogs,” Latimer said. “It’s exciting because it suggests these dogs could represent a model of the earliest stages of Alzheimer’s disease.”
UW Medicine also notes that, unlike studying mice, studying dogs allows researchers to study animals that live in the same environment and consume the same water and air. In addition, dogs naturally develop the neurodegenerative disease -- mice do not, according to UW Medicine.
The study was done partially at UW and also at Colorado State University.