Prescription for heart disease: pat a dog
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Just a few minutes spent patting a dog can relieve a heart patient’s anxiety and perhaps even help recovery during a visit to the hospital, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.
The effects were much more pronounced than when heart failure patients visited with a human volunteer or were left quietly alone, the researchers told a meeting of the American Heart Association in Dallas.
This therapy warrants serious consideration as an adjunct to medical therapy in hospitalized heart failure patients. Dogs are a great comfort,” said Kathie Cole, a registered nurse at the University of California Medical Center in Los Angeles who led the study.
“They make people happier, calmer and feel more loved. That is huge when you are scared and not feeling well.”
Stress can worsen heart disease, but Cole said no one had scientifically investigated whether simple stress-relieving measures such as petting an animal might help in a way that could be measured.
Cole’s team found that a 12-minute visit with a dog helped patients’ heart and lung function by lowering pulmonary pressure, reducing the release of harmful hormones and decreasing anxiety.
Her team studied 76 heart failure patients who stayed in the hospital for treatment, randomly assigning them either a 12-minute visit with a dog, a similar visit with a trained human volunteer or leaving them alone.
“We looked at the dogs’ effects on variables that characterize heart failure, including changes in cardiac function, neuroendocrine (stress hormone) activation and psychological changes in mood,” Cole said in a statement.
Anxiety scores dropped 24 percent for the patients visited by a dog, 10 percent in those visited by a person only and did not change among the patients left alone.
Levels of the stress hormone epinephrine dropped an average 17 percent after a dog visit; they dropped 2 percent in the volunteer-only group and rose an average of 7 percent in the patients left alone.
Systolic pulmonary artery pressure, a measure of pressure in the lungs, dropped by 5 percent during a dog visit and another 5 percent afterward. It rose in the other two groups.
“This study demonstrates that even a short-term exposure to dogs has beneficial physiological and psychosocial effects on patients who want it,” Cole said.
Heart failure is a chronic condition in which the heart gradually loses its ability to pump blood effectively. It can be treated with drugs, surgery or, in a last resort, with a heart transplant, but it kills half of patients within about five years.
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