New Delhi: A 15-year-old cat’s brain is surprisingly similar to that of an 80-year-old human. A recent study has found that cats might just offer scientists a new way of studying human ageing and related diseases.
The study, titled ‘Cat brains age like humans: translating time shows pet cats live to be natural models for human ageing’ was published in the journal Biology Open on 22 June. Researchers from the University of Bath in the UK, Auburn College of Veterinary Medicine in the US and École Nationale Vétérinaire de Toulouse in France, found that pet cats, unlike many other lab animals, live long enough to develop age-related brain changes often seen in older humans.
So far, the scientific community has relied heavily on mice to study ageing. However, mice and humans age very differently, with the former never quite reaching the rat equivalent of human old age. This is where studying cats could offer new insights.
Cat brains even shrink in a similar manner to human brains. The study even highlighted that domestic cats who often live longer due to better nutrition and healthcare, might give scientists a more realistic way to study brain decline even in cases of dementia and Alzheimer’s.
“There’s potential to develop large-scale veterinary health databases for companion animals, analogous to human health databases such as the UK Biobank. These kinds of resources could enhance our ability to study ageing and disease using real-world clinical and owner-reported data collected across species,” Brier Rigby Dames, research associate at the University of Bath, said in a press release.
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Translating cat years into human years
For the study, Dames worked with researchers to analyse thousands of data points across human and cat lifespans including veterinary clinical records and blood-based age markers to translate cat years into human years.
This translation was a key to the study because it dismissed the popular misconception that one cat year is about seven human years. Instead, researchers studied brain development, MRI scans, blood chemistry, anatomy, and physiology, to reach the conclusion that a 15-year-old cat is the equivalent of an 80-year-old human.
To widen the research, the team examined pet cats, colony cats, zoo wildcats, and see how they aged in different environments. Researchers used high resolution 7 Tesla and 3 Tesla MRI scans to study these brain changes.
The study’s co-author Ryan Gibson said that several cat owners have requested advanced brain imaging for their pets to diagnose potential diseases. These allow the team to collect data and study ageing animals in a real-world environment and not a lab.
“This expanded clinical access creates meaningful opportunities for translational research, improving our understanding of ageing and neurologic disease in ways that can benefit both feline and human patients,” he said in a press release.