• Posted August 22, 2025

Analysis Helps Vets Predict Dog Health Problems

Vets might be able to predict the diseases a dog will face in the future, based on their current ailments, a new study says.

Analysis of more than 26,000 dogs showed that some diseases tend to go together, providing veterinarians with a leg up on countering health problems among canines, researchers recently reported in the journal PLOS Computational Biology.

These disease pairs — comorbidities — occur naturally as both dogs and humans age, researchers noted.

For example, dogs tend to suffer hip dysplasia before they develop osteoarthritis, have dry eye syndrome before eye ulcers, and diabetes prior to cataracts.

“Because pet dogs share our homes, environments and many of our age-related diseases, mapping how their illnesses cluster and cascade offers a powerful window into the same multimorbidity processes that erode human health and points to earlier detection and prevention strategies for people too,” wrote the research team led by Antoinette Fang, a recent graduate of the University of Chicago.

For the study, researchers tracked the health of 26,614 dogs participating in the nationwide Dog Aging Project, a long-term study of canine health. They collected data on 160 health conditions, and created networks that showed which diseases tended to go together.

These networks showed some associations that were already known — diabetes tends to co-occur with blindness, and kidney disease with high blood pressure.

But researchers also found new connections, results show.

For example, there was an association between low iron levels in blood and an excess of protein in urine, researchers said.

“Mining owner-reported data from the Dog Aging Project, we built the first large-scale canine comorbidity network, confirming that diabetes often occurs before cataracts and revealing that health problems tend to cluster around a few key diseases as dogs age,” researchers wrote.

They also found that disease clusters became denser and more centered on a few key health problems as dogs aged, “echoing patterns seen in people,” researchers wrote.

The results also showed that specific diseases tended to strike different types of dogs.

“Larger dogs had higher lifetime prevalence of cancer and orthopedic disorders but lower odds of ocular, cardiac, hepatic and respiratory disease,” researchers wrote. “For cancer specifically, heavier dogs were diagnosed several years earlier than lighter dogs.”

Future studies could extend these networks to provide even more understanding of the complex interactions between multiple diseases, researchers said.

Genetic data also could be added, which would allow researchers to control for genetic differences between dogs.

More information

The American Kennel Club has more on common dog health problems.

SOURCES: PLOS, news release, Aug. 14, 2025; PLOS Computational Biology, Aug. 14, 2025