Hundehoden bieten Hinweise auf gesundes Altern und „Gebrechlichkeitsresilienz“ bei Männern. Eine frühe Kastration war mit schlechteren Ergebnissen verbunden. Bei Hunden, die vor dem 2. Lebensjahr kastriert wurden, stieg das Sterblichkeitsrisiko mit jedem kleinen Anstieg des Gebrechlichkeitswerts um 16 %. Diejenigen, die länger als etwa 10 Jahre intakt blieben, zeigten keine erhöhte Sterblichkeit.

I’ve linked to the news release in the post above. In this comment, for those interested, here’s the link to the peer reviewed journal article:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-20700-8

From the linked article:

**Dog testes offer clues to healthy aging and ‘frailty resilience’ in men**

A new study of exceptionally long-lived Rottweilers revealed that keeping their testes longer may help them age more gracefully, offering fresh clues for how hormones shape frailty and resilience in both dogs and humans.

Frailty was found to increase with age. Older dogs had higher FI scores on average. However, **early neutering was linked to worse outcomes. Dogs neutered before age two had a 16% increase in mortality risk for every small (0.01) rise in frailty score. Those kept intact for more than about 10 years showed no increased mortality with higher frailty**. Essentially, frailty was less lethal for them.

Each additional year of being intact reduced frailty-related death risk by about 1%. This “buffering effect” wasn’t explained by other factors such as being overweight, being born earlier or later, or having been neutered for medical reasons. The pattern held even when only including cases with veterinary-record-confirmed neuter dates (to rule out owner recall bias). So, in short, the longer a dog’s hormonal system stayed intact, the better it could “handle” frailty when it eventually appeared.