It says here that 1 in 2 dogs over 10 years old will have cancer of some kind (varies wildly by breed--smaller have much lower rates).
I'm trying to figure out how to compare those numbers. Two factors that come to mind are 1) senescence of the system as a whole and 2) the number of cell divisions that have taken place (more means more random accumulated errors). The replication rate varies a lot in humans depending on what kind of cell you're talking about--and since the faster replicating ones aren't necessarily the ones that have the most frequent cancers, I suspect that's not the biggest factor. I didn't find anything about cell division rates in dogs that I could use to compare with humans, but it probably doesn't matter anyway.
So maybe 10 dog years are like 60 human years, and the system isn't able to smack down failures as well? (On average--I know young ones can get cancer too.) Does the cancer rate with age normalized to the lifetime follow the same sort of trend with various breeds, or with other animals? Does anybody know?
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