This is a miracle drug that pretty much instantly changed both my (older) dogs' lives. Every vet tech I've spoken to (it's a monthly injection) agrees it is amazing.
Librela gave us another year with our old girl and allowed to her to walk again. It was absolutely life-altering for her and we're forever greatful for the extra time we had with her because of it. Some are saying it's not a miracle drug but honestly, a monthly injection that gave us back our girl for a year is 100% a miracle to me.
I'm just past the second dose on my older border collie, and it has been a good thing for him. But I would hesitate to call it a miracle. He's somewhat more active and flexible, but he still has some trouble climbing steps and stairs.
He also loves the cold, and he's always more active in the winter anyway. I would say he's close to the level he was last winter instead of slightly declined. That's great, but not miraculous.
We'll stick with the regimen and see if he continues to improve. I'll upgrade my judgement if he starts climbing stairs again.
+1 on the Librela. "Fine, I'll blow $99 on your snake oil injection. Who knows, maybe it might actually work!"
36 hours later, the limping stops and the dog wants to walk further than he has in years. We take him to doggy daycare once a week since his housemate passed, and daycare staff commented on how he was like a new dog. Not every day is a great day, but most of them are.
We thought we were going to have to say goodbye to our girl back in February this year. Her arthritis was so bad, she'd stopped using the litter and was... Backed up, let's just say.
But she's currently curled up right next to me, and generally acts like she used to a couple years ago. You can tell her legs are weaker than they were, but the pain doesn't bother her anymore.
My 19 year old cat is on the feline equivalent, Solensia (Frunevetmab). It is a once a month injection that relieves his joint pain. We don't have to give him other pain relief and so can save the stress on his kidneys.
He isn't back to being a kitten, you should have appropriate expectations, but he wasn't able to jump on or off the couch before, now he can. He is walking around more than he used to, before he would spent most of the day in his box. The effect of getting him more exercise is compounding his good health.
If you have an older cat/dog you should definitely talk to your vet about it.
If anyone here has any anti-aging resources for cats, I'd love to see them. I have two 9-year-old Maine Coons whom I'm supplementing with glucosamine for joint and urinary health, and wonder if there's more I could be doing.
Edit: Getting some great tips on core diet and health down below! Luckily we're already doing most of those, and I guess I'm largely wondering about advancements in supplementation or preventative medicine (of course everything would have to be considered with a veterinarian). Here are other basic things we already do:
* My most important thing is not giving any dry food. Especially since one of my cats is prone to urinary problems and gets sick within just a couple of weeks if given even a partially-dry diet. But even if he wasn't prone to it, with what I've learned over the years I would not feed any cat dry food.
* We eat partly wet partly homemade raw (but the latter needs to come with careful research and caveats since cats have very delicate nutritional needs).
* Keep water bowls away from food and switch bowls/fountain once in a while for novelty.
* Indoor-only and we go for walks on a harness for enrichment when the weather is nice.
We just lost our cat last week. She was 18 and got a tumor in her nose which became too big.
Her kidneys were mostly fine and it wasn’t a concern the last time we checked (about 6 months ago)
I think she lived so long because she was allergic to most commercially available food (chicken and beef allergy) so we had to feed her higher quality food with 95+% meat. We also put her water in a different spot or the house (cats hate drinking where they eat, the smell of food near water makes them think it’s unsafe to drink so they’ll drink much less of it)
She was an indoors only cat for the last 10 years of her life after some crazy junky partially shaved her.
If we ever get over the pain and get a new cat, I’d do it all over again:
- high quality, 95+% meat food (dry and wet, the cat picks whenever she’s hungry)
- indoors only (no crazy people, no antifreeze, no cars, no cats/animals fights)
- water bowl far away from food bowls
Not a miracle recipe, but she was older than any other cat I’ve known.
Raw food is the biggest thing. One of our cats has IBD and was about to be put down, raw food completely reversed it and now he’s better than before with no signs of slowing down.
Several vets have all told my parents to get mutts rather than purebreds because they have so much less problems. The genetics are just healthier and stronger because they’re a mix, instead of inbreeding for generations. Ditto for cats.
Good move unless it includes pit bull. Pitbull mixes are not appropriate for family pets and anyone who says otherwise is lying to you or themselves.
Please protect your loved ones and stay away from pitbulls and pitbull mixes. They are total sweet hearts, right up until they're not.
Edit:
I too was once a 'how it's raised' apologist. After a number of experiences and some research, my mind is concluded. Someone in the replies was kind enough to post papers, but if you don't have time for reading, this will express the overall point that these dogs are land-mines:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9ZGEvUwSMg
If you think you can readily find 10+ reports of 'unprovoked lethal violence with no prior history of violence' for another breed, please, be my guest.
This may vary by country but where I live cat breeders have actually started taking measures to avoid inbreeding even when this means foregoing "pure breeds". Inbreeding tends to be a bigger problem for dog breeds because they're usually more formally established historically.
I'm the Founder/CEO - appreciate the excitement! :) Lot's of work to do still, but a very important step for dogs and for lifespan extension pharmaceuticals.
Bear in mind dogs are pretty unnatural creatures at this point - we've done so much breeding that you can't really assume any natural forces apply to their development at this point. After all, why would any creature develop a facial structure that makes it hard to breathe (like bulldogs, pugs, etc.)? The answer is because humans are selfish.
This is pure speculation, but maybe it's beneficial in some circumstances to make way for the younger generation?
Natural selection doesn't necessarily favor genes that optimize the health of a particular animal. Natural selection favors genes that optimize for more copies of themselves, at whatever cost to their current carriers. Perhaps under some scenarios of canine evolution, the fittest genes might have been ones that selected for higher turnover than would happen if bodies wore out naturally.
I don't know what the mechanism for accelerating aging is in this case and it doesn't say, but IGF-1 serves a lot of purposes and it is ubiquitous among at least all mammals and I'm sure other animals I'm not familiar with. It is necessary for growth and healing and is what causes infants to grow and mature into adults. As with just about any molecule synthesized by a body, when its effect on mortality has been studied in humans, being either too low or too high are both associated with greater mortality risk. I'm guessing it's probably the same with dogs. Having higher growth hormone levels makes the larger breeds larger but also shortens lifespan. Nonetheless, being larger can clearly be important for a predator, especially in very cold regions where most available prey like caribou and bison and what not are very large. Shorter life might even be evolutionarily advantaeous on its own in places with food scarcity that can't sustain large predator populations. The old die to make way for the young as they'd otherwise starve them out.
Body doesn't `wear out` from use. Yes there are overuse injuries and overuse arthritis .
Aging related `wear out` has nothing do with use. Infact, opposite is often true. Its unfortunate that doctors refer to age related joint issues as 'wear and tear' issues.
Because the dogs we made aren’t naturally selected. We heavily selectively bred for many superficial phenotypes so it’s not strange to see side effects like this.
Kind of seems like a mercy, especially depending on what part of your body would wear out first. Would be interesting to study since we know stress also seems to increase aging, so I wonder if a stressful event triggers the aging process as a way to reduce suffering in the aging individual. Similarly there are cases where long married spouses die pretty closely to one another and I could see the stressful loss of your partner increasing your aging factor in such a case.
> Why would any creature have hormones to accelerate aging
Octopuses trigger rapid aging after
giving birth from their “optic gland,” which “undergoes dramatic changes to produce more pregnenolone and progesterone, maternal cholestanoids, and 7-DHC during the stages of decline” [1]. (”Some females in captivity even seem to intentionally speed along the death spiral, banging into the sides of the tank, tearing off pieces of skin or eating the tips of their own tentacles” [2].) When the optic gland was removed, the affected females “abandoned their eggs, resumed feeding, and some even mated again.”
Leading theories include octopuses being “cannibals” having evolved “a biologically programmed death spiral may be a way to keep mothers from eating their young.” Alternatively, octopuses are close to biologically immortal, “so eliminating hungry adults keeps the octopus ecosystem from being dominated by a few massive” members.
TL; DR Programmed death is biologically precedents. There is evidence it is at work in most animals, including humans.
So the goal is to make big dogs live longer... by reducing the hormone that makes them big?
Couldn't we just adopt healthier, proportional, longer lived dogs? Or do people just really want to see how miserable a 15 year old Great Dane would be?
Giant dogs are almost universally known for their gentle temperament and superior qualities for families. They are treasures, regardless of how they age.
Until you’ve owned a Great Dane and see how much joy they bring you and your family, I don’t think you could understand why there is a desire to help their longevity.
We accept death because we have to, not because it's actually a good thing.
If you were enslaved with no expectation of freedom, you'd do your best to make peace with it just to survive. But you might also spend your free time secretly trying to find a way out.
I recently visited nyc and was hanging out in central park. I saw so many huge dogs, huskies/german shepards/retriever/etc, which made me sick to my stomach. These poor animals need space. They are not biologically designed to be an accessory for the urban rich. Being held hostage in 300 sq foot apartments while their vapid owners are working in some office or on zoom calls all day is borderline torture. These drugs will just prolong said torture.
Do we really need to be using up government resources doing drug approvals for dogs? It takes so long to get human drugs approved. Let's use the resources there and let the market sort out what works for animals.
[+] [-] AlexErrant|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|2 years ago|reply
Reasonable expectation of effectiveness for large dog lifespan extension - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38447491 - Nov 2023 (186 comments)
[+] [-] jurassicfoxy|2 years ago|reply
This is a miracle drug that pretty much instantly changed both my (older) dogs' lives. Every vet tech I've spoken to (it's a monthly injection) agrees it is amazing.
[+] [-] pmx|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spchampion2|2 years ago|reply
He also loves the cold, and he's always more active in the winter anyway. I would say he's close to the level he was last winter instead of slightly declined. That's great, but not miraculous.
We'll stick with the regimen and see if he continues to improve. I'll upgrade my judgement if he starts climbing stairs again.
[+] [-] mikestew|2 years ago|reply
36 hours later, the limping stops and the dog wants to walk further than he has in years. We take him to doggy daycare once a week since his housemate passed, and daycare staff commented on how he was like a new dog. Not every day is a great day, but most of them are.
[+] [-] DanHulton|2 years ago|reply
We thought we were going to have to say goodbye to our girl back in February this year. Her arthritis was so bad, she'd stopped using the litter and was... Backed up, let's just say.
But she's currently curled up right next to me, and generally acts like she used to a couple years ago. You can tell her legs are weaker than they were, but the pain doesn't bother her anymore.
Miracle is a pretty reasonable word, yeah.
[+] [-] verve_rat|2 years ago|reply
He isn't back to being a kitten, you should have appropriate expectations, but he wasn't able to jump on or off the couch before, now he can. He is walking around more than he used to, before he would spent most of the day in his box. The effect of getting him more exercise is compounding his good health.
If you have an older cat/dog you should definitely talk to your vet about it.
[+] [-] jghn|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mhb|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drakonka|2 years ago|reply
Edit: Getting some great tips on core diet and health down below! Luckily we're already doing most of those, and I guess I'm largely wondering about advancements in supplementation or preventative medicine (of course everything would have to be considered with a veterinarian). Here are other basic things we already do:
* My most important thing is not giving any dry food. Especially since one of my cats is prone to urinary problems and gets sick within just a couple of weeks if given even a partially-dry diet. But even if he wasn't prone to it, with what I've learned over the years I would not feed any cat dry food.
* We eat partly wet partly homemade raw (but the latter needs to come with careful research and caveats since cats have very delicate nutritional needs).
* Keep water bowls away from food and switch bowls/fountain once in a while for novelty.
* Indoor-only and we go for walks on a harness for enrichment when the weather is nice.
[+] [-] ornornor|2 years ago|reply
Her kidneys were mostly fine and it wasn’t a concern the last time we checked (about 6 months ago)
I think she lived so long because she was allergic to most commercially available food (chicken and beef allergy) so we had to feed her higher quality food with 95+% meat. We also put her water in a different spot or the house (cats hate drinking where they eat, the smell of food near water makes them think it’s unsafe to drink so they’ll drink much less of it)
She was an indoors only cat for the last 10 years of her life after some crazy junky partially shaved her.
If we ever get over the pain and get a new cat, I’d do it all over again:
- high quality, 95+% meat food (dry and wet, the cat picks whenever she’s hungry)
- indoors only (no crazy people, no antifreeze, no cars, no cats/animals fights)
- water bowl far away from food bowls
Not a miracle recipe, but she was older than any other cat I’ve known.
[+] [-] post_break|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antisthenes|2 years ago|reply
Aside from that, Maines are already a very long lived generally healthy breed.
[+] [-] DanHulton|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ornornor|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boppo1|2 years ago|reply
Please protect your loved ones and stay away from pitbulls and pitbull mixes. They are total sweet hearts, right up until they're not.
Edit: I too was once a 'how it's raised' apologist. After a number of experiences and some research, my mind is concluded. Someone in the replies was kind enough to post papers, but if you don't have time for reading, this will express the overall point that these dogs are land-mines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9ZGEvUwSMg
If you think you can readily find 10+ reports of 'unprovoked lethal violence with no prior history of violence' for another breed, please, be my guest.
[+] [-] hnbad|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] celinehh94|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deadbabe|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] idopmstuff|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] loudmax|2 years ago|reply
Natural selection doesn't necessarily favor genes that optimize the health of a particular animal. Natural selection favors genes that optimize for more copies of themselves, at whatever cost to their current carriers. Perhaps under some scenarios of canine evolution, the fittest genes might have been ones that selected for higher turnover than would happen if bodies wore out naturally.
[+] [-] nonameiguess|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Waterluvian|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] apwell23|2 years ago|reply
Body doesn't `wear out` from use. Yes there are overuse injuries and overuse arthritis .
Aging related `wear out` has nothing do with use. Infact, opposite is often true. Its unfortunate that doctors refer to age related joint issues as 'wear and tear' issues.
[+] [-] huytersd|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] graphe|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] I_Am_Nous|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|2 years ago|reply
Octopuses trigger rapid aging after giving birth from their “optic gland,” which “undergoes dramatic changes to produce more pregnenolone and progesterone, maternal cholestanoids, and 7-DHC during the stages of decline” [1]. (”Some females in captivity even seem to intentionally speed along the death spiral, banging into the sides of the tank, tearing off pieces of skin or eating the tips of their own tentacles” [2].) When the optic gland was removed, the affected females “abandoned their eggs, resumed feeding, and some even mated again.”
Leading theories include octopuses being “cannibals” having evolved “a biologically programmed death spiral may be a way to keep mothers from eating their young.” Alternatively, octopuses are close to biologically immortal, “so eliminating hungry adults keeps the octopus ecosystem from being dominated by a few massive” members.
TL; DR Programmed death is biologically precedents. There is evidence it is at work in most animals, including humans.
[1] https://news.uchicago.edu/story/what-causes-octopus-death-sp...
[2] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180925140402.h...
[+] [-] ramesh31|2 years ago|reply
Couldn't we just adopt healthier, proportional, longer lived dogs? Or do people just really want to see how miserable a 15 year old Great Dane would be?
[+] [-] Der_Einzige|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] balls187|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ben30|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mildmotive|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] xutopia|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wiz21c|2 years ago|reply
I understand one may really like its dog/cat/... but, why not just accept time passes ?
(I've lost a goldfish and I was not happy, proper burial helped a lot)
[+] [-] appplication|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] digging|2 years ago|reply
If you were enslaved with no expectation of freedom, you'd do your best to make peace with it just to survive. But you might also spend your free time secretly trying to find a way out.
[+] [-] 5ADBEEF|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] actionfromafar|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HEmanZ|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ksoped|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scoopertrooper|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gedy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sergers|2 years ago|reply
Thinking this was familiar, I saw it on local news tv on Nov 30
https://globalnews.ca/news/10139206/new-drug-big-dogs-longer...
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] stronglikedan|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Eumenes|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stephenitis|2 years ago|reply
I do think it's harder to manage a dog's existence in a crowded city's parks.
[+] [-] fallingknife|2 years ago|reply