Skip to content
Health
Link copied to clipboard

Zoobiquity: What animals can tell humans about health

What do a French bulldog and a 3-year-old girl with atopic dermatitis have in common? Is there a tie between sleep apnea in an American bulldog and a 40-year-old obese man? What can human heart disease tell us about the heart problems of giant apes?

Attendees of the Zoobiquity 6 conference walk past animal X-rays. The daylong event included tours of the Philadelphia Zoo and Penn Vets' New Bolton Center.
Attendees of the Zoobiquity 6 conference walk past animal X-rays. The daylong event included tours of the Philadelphia Zoo and Penn Vets' New Bolton Center.Read moreJENNIFER KERRIGAN / Staff Photographer

What do a French bulldog and a 3-year-old girl with atopic dermatitis have in common? Is there a tie between sleep apnea in an American bulldog and a 40-year-old obese man? What can human heart disease tell us about the heart problems of giant apes?

These topics were among those tackled at the recent Zoobiquity 6 conference at the University of Pennsylvania, where about 200 physicians and medical students joined veterinarians to examine and reinforce the idea that, in some ways, there is no dividing line between human and animal medicine.

Or, as keynote speaker Stephanie Murphy, director of the Division of Comparative Medicine at the National Institutes of Health, put it: "A liver is a liver is a liver."

Zoobiquity is the brainchild of cardiologist Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and freelance writer Kathryn Bowers, who published Zoobiquity: The Astonishing Connection Between Human and Animal Health in 2012.

The big distinction between Zoobiquity and using animals for scientific research is that animals are not given diseases for study.

"These are naturally occurring ailments that vets treat across species," said Natterson-Horowitz. "The idea is that vets' experience - and research into how to treat these ailments - could be helpful for human diseases and vice versa."

While at UCLA, Natterson-Horowitz received a call from a veterinarian at the Los Angeles Zoo, where a chimpanzee had woken with a facial droop. Concerned that the animal had a stroke, zoo veterinarians asked Natterson-Horowitz to image the animal's heart for possible cardiac disease.

While Natterson-Horowitz ruled out a stroke in the chimpanzee, the experience and her subsequent work at the zoo led her to recognize that many of the procedures for animals were identical to those she performed on her human patients.

"Human beings and animals share the vast majority of health problems," said Natterson-Horowitz. "People tend to think that wild animals succumb to predation or human beings are the only species that have this or that."

"What we want to show is that human and veterinary medicine are parallel and to begin to create awareness of a deep and essential connection," she said.

The concept of studying animals and humans for commonalities in diseases is not new, said Joan Hendricks, dean of the School of Veterinary Medicine at Penn.

"Veterinarians have never not done this," said Hendricks.

She notes an address by founding father and physician Benjamin Rush during the early days of Penn medical school. "It was a wonderful lecture that spoke to the necessity of understanding the disease of domestic animals. Among his points was that it was ethically important, that it worked better over time since animals were healthy. And that, basically, animals were the same as us."

"Fundamentally, if you understand animals you'll understand people better. It's not that M.D.s don't understand that every development for humans has come from animals, but there is . . . a bias that people are more important, better, and complicated."

Over the daylong conference, which included field trips to the Philadelphia Zoo, and Penn Vets' New Bolton Center and Hill Pavilion, speakers noted the many ways in which veterinary science affects human lives.

At the zoo, a vet and a nurse-practitioner compared behavioral improvements in animals due to a new trail system with the positive reactions of children with autism to soothing bedroom environments. Other speakers explored the management of cardiac disease in great apes and that of a 57-year-old man, and common approaches to treating enteritis in a child and a Coquerel's sifaka lemur.

As for that French bulldog with atopic dermatitis and a secondary staph infection, vets and physicians joined forces to examine skin samples from dogs to study the role of resistant microbial organisms, the onset of infection, and the development of antimicrobial resistance once the infection occurred.

Their findings showed that an upset in the diversity of the skin microbiome caused by flare-ups of staph bacteria might influence the course of the condition both in humans and dogs.

This was a particularly important collaboration, said presenter Elizabeth Grice, assistant professor of dermatology at Penn's Perelman School of Medicine, "because mice aren't a very good model for this disease."

"I had no idea there was such a thing as atopic dermatitis in dogs," she said. "It was really people in the vet school who introduced me to the idea."

Grice said she wasn't surprised to see staph increases during flare-ups of atopic dermatitis symptoms, but she was surprised by "how identical the models were" between dog and human microbiomes.

Dogs are also a handy way to study sleep apnea, which likely won't surprise anyone whose family pet snores. In fact, veterinarians began noticing apnea in certain dog breeds about four decades ahead of humans, said Hendricks, who studied bulldogs with the conditions. The bulldogs' flattened faces created breathing difficulties akin to those experienced by humans.

"One big difference is that dog owners rarely complain of the disease, which might lead to excessive sleepiness in pets," she said. "No one complains if their dogs take long naps and, unlike humans, dogs don't drive."

Hendricks teamed with Sigrid Veasey, a sleep apnea researcher at the Perelman School of Medicine. They realized both dogs and people showed pauses in breathing - sometimes up to one minute in the canines - along with a drop in blood-oxygen saturation. They have found that a drug combination of trazadone and L-tryptophan, which has reduced apnea in bulldogs, might help people, as well.

Natterson-Horowitz says the zoobiquitous approach can also help dispel the myths around mental illnesses.

"By showing that animals also have these psychiatric problems, such as anxiety disorders, separation anxieties, eating disorders or compulsive disorders, we can show that these diseases happen on their own spontaneously and shouldn't be stigmatized."

Hendricks says helping veterinarians connect with physicians will likely increase recognition for veterinary medicine.

"I'm grateful for Barbara's mission," she said. "When you're a vet, it helps to have physician advocates."

mice30@comcast.net

215-470-2998