Research Paper|Volume 11, Issue 17|pp 6892—6903

Construction of a comprehensive observer-based scale assessing aging-related health and functioning in captive rhesus macaques

Wei Deng¹, Guoying Guan², Chong Xiao¹, Guangjin Qu², Jing Xue¹, Chuan Qin¹, Hui Han², Yuhong Wang²

¹Key Laboratory of Human Disease Comparative Medicine, Chinese Ministry of Health, Beijing Key Laboratory for Animal Models of Emerging and Remerging Infectious Diseases, Institute of Laboratory Animal Science, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and Comparative Medicine Center, Peking Union Medical College, Beijing, China
²Department of Geriatrics, The First Affiliated Hospital of Harbin Medical University, Harbin, China

* Co-first authors

Received: June 30, 2019Accepted: August 13, 2019Published: September 9, 2019

Copyright © 2019 Deng et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Aging-related health and functioning are difficult to quantify in humans and nonhuman primates. We constructed an observer-based scale for daily application in assessing the aging-related health and functioning of rhesus macaques. Ten items referring to an aging appearance, musculoskeletal aging and aging-related eating behavior were selected through a panel consensus. The Aging-related Health and Functioning Scale (AHFS) was constructed based on these scored items form 57 healthy rhesus macaques. High reliability of the AHFS was shown based on Cronbach’s alpha coefficient (0.877). The structure of the AHFS was validated by three exploratory factors. The largest factor, whose four components were dietary uptake, iliac muscle mass, hair condition and fragility, and sex, explained 50.5% of the variation in aging-related health and functioning scores. The second factor, involving age, tooth loss and tooth wear, explained 15.5% of the variation. The lowest-ranking factor comprised only facial redness and accounted for 10% of the variation. A hierarchical cluster analysis validated the good applicability of the scale in distinct samples. From these scale-scored results, complicated aging phenomena observed in humans, including the sex-survival paradox and the calorie-related health-survival paradox, were both demonstrated in rhesus macaques. Therefore, the AHFS provides a valuable approach for aging-related research.