Lifespan of companion dogs seen in three independent primary care veterinary clinics in the United States.

Our findings show that it is possible to obtain and analyze data from independent veterinary clinics in the US, an approach that could be useful for studies of comparative epidemiology under the One Health and One Welfare paradigms. We also show that the lifespan effects of gonadectomy are not identical between the sexes and should be investigated separately by sex in future analyses. More research is needed to further clarify the influence of age at gonadectomy, as well as the factors leading to the observed differences in lifespan in the "Mountain" ancestral group and in dog breeds of varying inbreeding coefficients and effective population sizes.