Slow walking could be a sign of dementia in dogs

According to a new study, dogs that slow down physically also slow down mentally.

Measuring walking speed in older dogs could be a simple way to monitor their health and document the decline in neurological function as they age.

“Walking speed in people is strongly associated with cognitive decline,” says Natasha Olby, chair of gerontology at North Carolina State University and corresponding author of the study. “We hypothesized that the same might be true in dogs.”

Olby and his colleagues measured off-leash walking speed in 46 adult dogs and 49 senior dogs. The adult dogs, which served as a control group, only had their walking speed measured. Senior dogs performed additional cognitive tests and their owners completed a cognitive assessment questionnaire, called the CADES questionnaire. A higher CADES score indicates more severe cognitive decline.

The senior dogs were grouped according to their scores on the CADES and cognitive tests. Individual walking speed was first measured by walking them a distance of five meters on a leash with a handler, then offering a treat the same distance away from the dogs and calling them to retrieve it off-leash.

“The challenge with measuring walking speed is that dogs tend to match the speed of their administrator on-leash, so we measured both on-leash and off-leash to see which was the most useful measurement,” says Olby.

“Also, we’re always concerned that body size and limb length will affect walking speed, but if you see a Chihuahua and a Great Dane walking together without a leash, the smaller one isn’t always behind the dog. ‘other,” Olby continues. “We found that on a leash, height correlates with walking speed, but off a leash it makes no difference. Capturing off-leash walking speed allows us to see the effects of both physical ability and food motivation.

The researchers found that in older dogs, size didn’t matter when it came to speed; in other words, dogs in the last 25% of their expected lifespan moved more slowly than adult dogs, regardless of their relative size.

“Just like in humans, our walking speed is pretty steady for most of our lives, and then it decreases as we enter the last quarter of our lifespan,” says Olby.

Older dogs that moved more slowly had levels of cognitive decline based on questionnaires completed by the owner and also did less well on cognitive tests.

The researchers also found that joint pain did not appear to be correlated with walking speed, although they note that there were no dogs with severe osteoarthritis in the program. They hope to solve this problem in future work.

“When you look at functional aging, the two most important predictors of morbidity are mobility and cognition,” says Olby. “Mobility is highly dependent on sensory input, central processing and motor output – in other words, the nervous system – therefore mobility and cognition are super interconnected. When you have less mobility, the amount of input your nervous system receives is also reduced. It’s no surprise that walking speed and dementia are correlated.

“For me, the exciting part of the study is not just that we show that walking speed is correlated with dementia in dogs. like in people, but also that the test method we used is easy to replicate, as it is food-driven and over a short distance. It could become a simple screening test that any veterinarian could perform on aging patients.

The work appears in Frontiers in Veterinary Science. Support came from the Kady M. Gjessing and Rahna M. Davidson Distinguished Chair in Gerontology.

Source: NC status