Exceptional longevity and potential determinants of successful ageing in a cohort of 39 Labrador retrievers: results of a prospective longitudinal study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The aim of this study was to describe the longevity and causes of mortality in 39 (12 males, 27 females) pedigree adult neutered Labrador retrievers with a median age of 6.5 years at the start of the study and kept under similar housing and management conditions. Body condition score was maintained between two and four on a 5-point scale by varying food allowances quarterly. The impact of change in body weight (BW) and body composition on longevity was analysed using linear mixed models with random slopes and intercepts. RESULTS: On 31 July 2014, 10 years after study start, dogs were classified into three lifespan groups: 13 (33 %) Expected (≥9 to ≤12.9 years), 15 (39 %) Long (≥13 to ≤15.5 years) and 11 (28 %) Exceptional (≥15.6 years) with five still alive. Gender and age at neutering were not associated with longevity (P ≥ 0.06). BW increased similarly for all lifespan groups up to age 9, thereafter, from 9 to 13 years, Exceptional dogs gained and Long-lifespan dogs lost weight (P = 0.007). Dual-energy x-ray absorptiometer scans revealed that absolute fat mass increase was slower to age 13 for Long compared with Expected lifespan dogs (P = 0.003) whilst all groups lost a similar amount of absolute lean mass (P > 0.05). Percent fat increase and percent lean loss were slower, whilst the change in fat:lean was smaller, in both the Exceptional and Long lifespan compared with Expected dogs to age 13 (P ≤ 0.02). Total bone mineral density was significantly lower for Expected compared to Exceptional and Long lifespan dogs (P < 0.04). CONCLUSIONS: This study shows that life-long maintenance of lean body mass and attenuated accumulation of body fat were key factors in achieving a longer lifespan. The results suggest that a combination of a high quality plane of nutrition with appropriate husbandry and healthcare are important in obtaining a greater than expected proportion of Labrador retrievers living well beyond that of the expected breed lifespan: 89.7 % (95 % CI 74.8-96.7 %) dogs were alive at 12 years of age and 28.2 % (95 % CI 15.6-45.1 %) reaching an exceptional lifespan of ≥15.6 years.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".