DogRisk - Health via Nutrition, Epidemiology and Disease Detection Dogs

DogRisk is the only independent and university-based research group in the world, which analyses the connections between diets, environmental factors and chronic diseases that affect dogs. Largely funded by donations and other external funding, our mission is to help dogs live happier, healthier and longer lives by preventing chronic diseases.

For the past 15 years, our team of researchers have conducted free-to-view research about a range of chronic diseases in dogs, such as cancer, diabetes and epilepsy. Through our research, we show how dog owners can make informed decisions about their dog’s diet and the factors they can change, which will benefit their dog’s health and help them to avoid these chronic diseases.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, our research group also made international headlines when it was part of a multi-university research project in Finland, which proved dogs could be trained to detect COVID-19 infections and subsequently trained COVID detection dogs for Helsinki-Vantaa airport.

Our multidisciplinary research group help to uncover reasons behind diseases and study treating them un-conventionally. These are diseases that humans have in common with dogs: e.g. allergy, atopy, cancer, diabetes, epilepsy, osteoarthritis, hypothyroidism, irritable bowl syndrome etc. They are affecting the lives of millions of people and they are also a big burden to millions of dogs and their owners. We are interested in associations between diseases, nutrition, environment, gene-expression, metabolomics, minerals and trace-elements, microbiota etc. By using client-owned dogs as our study population, we are hoping to help both man's best friend and people to have happier and healthier lives.