Animal-model concordance

Deep dives

Dog and cat conditions that may mirror human ones

Some diseases occur naturally in dogs or cats and look like a human disease. Each deep dive asks how far the resemblance goes, feature by feature and drug by drug, and says where it stops.

dogchecked 2026-09-22

Narcolepsy in dogs and people

The dog led to the cause of the human disease, and dog and human responses to drugs acting downstream of hypocretin mostly agreed. The first drug to replace hypocretin signaling was approved in 2026; the familial dog lacks the receptor it needs, and the dog form that matches the human cause has not been used in a drug trial.

Narcolepsy type 1 (narcolepsy with cataplexy) · 66 sources · 11 features · 17 drug comparisons

How a deep dive is built

Each one follows the same steps:

  1. Name the pair. One dog or cat condition, one human condition.
  2. Find the sources. Targeted PubMed searches, recorded on the page with their queries and counts. These are not systematic reviews: a deep dive goes deep on one condition, where the main review measures agreement across many.
  3. Read the papers. Claims are checked against each paper's results, tables, figure legends and supplements, and the numbers behind them are listed with the source.
  4. Score each feature. Signs, cause, biomarkers and drug responses, each marked matches, partly, differs, conflicting or not tested, with the evidence one click away.
  5. Compare drugs. Agreement is computed from the recorded effect in each species, never typed by hand. A drug tested in only one species counts as cannot compare, not as agreement.
  6. Say what it means, and what would change it.

Every claim links to its source. Statements that something was not found name the search that did not find it.