The Golden Retriever Lifetime Study: establishing an observational cohort study with translational relevance for human health

Abstract

The Golden Retriever Lifetime Study (GRLS) is the first prospective longitudinal study attempted in veterinary medicine to identify the major dietary, genetic and environmental risk factors for cancer and other important diseases in dogs. The GRLS is an observational study that will follow a cohort of 3000 purebred Golden Retrievers throughout their lives via annual online questionnaires from the dog owner and annual physical examinations and collection of biological samples by the primary care veterinarian. The field of comparative medicine investigating naturally occurring disorders in pets is specifically relevant to the many diseases that have a genetic basis for disease in both animals and humans, including cancer, blindness, metabolic and behavioural disorders and some neurodegenerative disorders. The opportunity for the GRLS to provide high-quality data for translational comparative medical initiatives in several disease categories is great. In particular, the opportunity to develop a lifetime dataset of lifestyle and activity, environmental exposure and diet history combined with simultaneous annual biological sample sets and detailed health outcomes will provide disease incidence data for this cohort of geographically dispersed dogs and associations with a wide variety of potential risk factors. The GRLS will provide a lifetime historical context, repeated biological sample sets and outcomes necessary to interrogate complex associations between genes and environmental influences and cancer.

The dog aging project: translational geroscience in companion animals

“…Our work is inspired in part by the Golden Retriever Lifetime Study (GRLS), a project that follows 3000 Golden Retrievers from birth to death (Guy et al 2015). The GRLS, funded and run by the Morris Animal Foundation, focuses specifically on cancer, the primary cause of death in 60% of dogs in this breed.…”

Peto's paradox and the hallmarks of cancer: constructing an evolutionary framework for understanding the incidence of cancer

“…The study of the cells of different rodent species in culture both supported the expectations of the evolutionary model and revealed novel species-specific anti-cancer strategies (table 1). Furthermore, interest in comparative approaches that exploit data from non-model species are rapidly increasing [26][27][28][29], so that we can anticipate further tests of the evolutionary model. The domestic dog is a species notable for having an extensive dataset and studies of breedspecific differences in cancer risk are already proving to be productive [28][29][30].…”

Peto's paradox and the promise of comparative oncology

“…Picking up on this point, Guy et al [17] report on the very exciting Golden Retriever Lifetime Study (GRLS) that has successfully established an observational cohort study of a single dog breed at high risk for several cancers with direct translational relevance for human health. Their article describes the GRLS as the first prospective longitudinal study in veterinary medicine comprehensively to detail the major dietary, genetic and environmental risk factors for cancer in dogs.…”

“…This perspective shifts the focus on the principles that govern how these defence mechanisms evolve, and the comparative interspecific study of variation in cancer defences. Comparative studies are in their infancy, but work comparing multiple species of rodent has already proved productive [15], and there is growing interest in investigating the origins of naturally occurring cancer in dogs [16,17]. Progress towards developing the study of 'comparative oncology' will require a multidisciplinary approach, integrating mathematical and computational theory, empirical and comparative analysis, and controlled experimental investigation.…”