Is owning a dog good for your health?

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Australia loves dogs. We have one of the highest rates of pet ownership in the world, and one in two households has at least one dog.

But are they good for our health?

Mental health is the second-most common reason cited for getting a dog, after companionship. And many of us say we “feel healthier” for having a dog – and let them sleep in our bedroom.

Here’s what it means for our physical and mental health to share our homes (and doonas) with our canine companions.

Pogodina Natalia/Shutterstock

Are there physical health benefits to having a dog?

Having a dog is linked to lower risk of death over the long term. In 2019, a systematic review gathered evidence published over 70 years, involving nearly four million individual medical cases. It found people who owned a dog had a 24% lower risk of dying from any cause compared to those who did not own a dog.

A golden retriever pants on the grass next to a ball.
Having a dog may help lower your blood pressure through more physical activity. Barnabas Davoti/Pexels

Dog ownership was linked to increased physical activity. This lowered blood pressure and helped reduce the risk of stroke and heart disease.

The review found for those with previous heart-related medical issues (such as heart attack), living with a dog reduced their subsequent risk of dying by 35%, compared to people with the same history but no dog.

Another recent UK study found adult dog owners were almost four times as likely to meet daily physical activity targets as non-owners. Children in households with a dog were also more active and engaged in more unstructured play, compared to children whose family didn’t have a dog.

Exposure to dirt and microbes carried in from outdoors may also strengthen immune systems and lead to less use of antibiotics in young children who grow up with dogs.

A boy in sunglasses talks to his jack russell terrier on a beach.
Children in households with a dog were often more active. Maryshot/Shutterstock

Health risks

However, dogs can also pose risks to our physical health. One of the most common health issues for pet owners is allergies.

Dogs’ saliva, urine and dander (the skin cells they shed) can trigger allergic reactions resulting in a range of symptoms, from itchy eyes and runny nose to breathing difficulties.

A recent meta-analysis pooled data from nearly two million children. Findings suggested early exposure to dogs may increase the risk of developing asthma (although not quite as much as having a cat does). The child’s age, how much contact they have with the dog and their individual risk all play a part.

Slips, trips and falls are another risk – more people fall over due to dogs than cats.

Having a dog can also expose you to bites and scratches which may become infected and pose a risk for those with compromised immune systems. And they can introduce zoonotic diseases into your home, including ring worm and Campylobacter, a disease that causes diarrhoea.

For those sharing the bed there is an elevated the risk of allergies and picking up ringworm. It may result in lost sleep, as dogs move around at night.

On the other hand some owners report feeling more secure while co-sleeping with their dogs, with the emotional benefit outweighing the possibility of sleep disturbance or waking up with flea bites.

Proper veterinary care and hygiene practices are essential to minimise these risks.

A dog peers out from under a doona while a man sleeps.
Many of us don’t just share a home with a dog – we let them sleep in our beds. Claudia Mañas/Unsplash

What about mental health?

Many people know the benefits of having a dog are not only physical.

As companions, dogs can provide significant emotional support helping to alleviate symptoms of anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress. Their presence may offer comfort and a sense of purpose to individuals facing mental health challenges.

Loneliness is a significant and growing public health issue in Australia.

In the dog park and your neighbourhood, dogs can make it easier to strike up conversations with strangers and make new friends. These social interactions can help build a sense of community belonging and reduce feelings of social isolation.

For older adults, dog walking can be a valuable loneliness intervention that encourages social interaction with neighbours, while also combating declining physical activity.

However, if you’re experiencing chronic loneliness, it may be hard to engage with other people during walks. An Australian study found simply getting a dog was linked to decreased loneliness. People reported an improved mood – possibly due to the benefits of strengthening bonds with their dog.

Three dogs on leash sniff each other.
Walking a dog can make it easier to talk to people in your neighbourhood. KPegg/Shutterstock

What are the drawbacks?

While dogs can bring immense joy and numerous health benefits, there are also downsides and challenges. The responsibility of caring for a dog, especially one with behavioural issues or health problems, can be overwhelming and create financial stress.

Dogs have shorter lifespans than humans, and the loss of a beloved companion can lead to depression or exacerbate existing mental health conditions.

Lifestyle compatibility and housing conditions also play a significant role in whether having a dog is a good fit.

The so-called pet effect suggests that pets, often dogs, improve human physical and mental health in all situations and for all people. The reality is more nuanced. For some, having a pet may be more stressful than beneficial.

Importantly, the animals that share our homes are not just “tools” for human health. Owners and dogs can mutually benefit when the welfare and wellbeing of both are maintained.

Tania Signal, Professor of Psychology, School of Health, Medical and Applied Sciences, CQUniversity Australia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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  • Quit Like a Woman – by Holly Whitaker

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    We’ve reviewed “quit drinking” books before, so what makes this one different?

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  • Overcome Front-Of-Hip Pain

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    Dr. Alyssa Kuhn, physiotherapist, demonstrates how:

    One, two, three…

    One kind of pain affects a lot of related things: hip pain has an impact on everything that’s connected to the pelvis, which is basically the rest of the body, but especially the spine itself. For this reason, it’s critical to keep it in as good condition as possible.

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  • Hazelnuts vs Pecans – Which is Healthier?

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    Our Verdict

    When comparing hazelnuts to pecans, we picked the hazelnuts.

    Why?

    In terms of macros, hazelnuts have more protein, carbs, and fiber, though the difference is not big in the latter two cases, and the glycemic indices are resultantly about the same. Meanwhile, pecans have a little more fat, but the fat is healthy in both cases. Everything taken into account, we’re calling it a tie on macros.

    When it comes to vitamins, hazelnuts have more of vitamins B3, B5, B6, B7, B9, C, E, K, and choline, while pecans have more of vitamins A, B1, and B2. An easy win for hazelnuts here.

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Related Posts

  • Women take more antidepressants after divorce than men but that doesn’t mean they’re more depressed
  • An Unexpected Extra Threat Of Alcohol

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    If You Could Use Some Exotic Booze…

    …then for health reasons, we’re going to have to say “nay”.

    We’ve written about alcohol before, and needless to say, it’s not good:

    Can We Drink To Good Health?

    (the answer is “no, we cannot”)

    In fact, the WHO (which unlike government regulatory bodies setting “safe” limits on drinking, makes no profit from taxes on alcohol sales) has declared that “the only safe amount of alcohol is zero”:

    WHO: No level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health

    Up there, where the air is rarefied…

    If you’re flying somewhere this summer (Sinatra-style flying honeymoon or otherwise), you might want to skip the alcohol even if you normally do imbibe, because:

    ❝…even in young and healthy individuals, the combination of alcohol intake with sleeping under hypobaric conditions poses a considerable strain on the cardiac system and might lead to exacerbation of symptoms in patients with cardiac or pulmonary diseases.

    These effects might be even greater in older people; cardiovascular symptoms have a prevalence of 7% of inflight medical emergencies, with cardiac arrest causing 58% of aircraft diversions.❞

    Source: Alcohol plus cabin pressure at higher altitude may threaten sleeping plane passengers’ heart health

    The experiment divided subjects into a control group and a study group; the study group were placed in simulated cabin pressure as though at altitude, which found, when giving some of them two small(we’re talking the kind given on flights) alcoholic drinks:

    ❝The combination of alcohol and simulated cabin pressure at cruising altitude prompted a fall in SpO2 to an average of just over 85% and a compensatory increase in heart rate to an average of nearly 88 beats/minute during sleep.

    In contrast, that was 77 beats/minute for those who had alcohol but weren’t at altitude pressure, or 64 beats/minute for those who neither drank nor were at altitude pressure.

    Lots more metrics were recorded and the study is interesting to read; if you’ve ever slept on a plane and thought “that sleep was not restful at all”, then know: it wasn’t just the seat’s fault, nor the engine, nor the recycled nature of the air—it was the reduced pressure causing hypoxia (defined as having oxygen levels lower than the healthy clinical norm of 90%) and almost halving your sleep’s effectiveness for a less than 10% drop in available oxygen in the blood (the sleepers not at altitude pressure averaged 96% SpO2, compared to the 85% at altitude).

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    Oh, and the study participants? All healthy individuals aged 18–40, so again probably worse for those older (or younger) than that range, or with existing health conditions!

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    You can read the study in full here:

    Effects of moderate alcohol consumption and hypobaric hypoxia: implications for passengers’ sleep, oxygen saturation and heart rate on long-haul flights

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  • Their First Baby Came With Medical Debt. These Illinois Parents Won’t Have Another.

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    JACKSONVILLE, Ill. — Heather Crivilare was a month from her due date when she was rushed to an operating room for an emergency cesarean section.

    The first-time mother, a high school teacher in rural Illinois, had developed high blood pressure, a sometimes life-threatening condition in pregnancy that prompted doctors to hospitalize her. Then Crivilare’s blood pressure spiked, and the baby’s heart rate dropped. “It was terrifying,” Crivilare said.

    She gave birth to a healthy daughter. What followed, though, was another ordeal: thousands of dollars in medical debt that sent Crivilare and her husband scrambling for nearly a year to keep collectors at bay.

    The Crivilares would eventually get on nine payment plans as they juggled close to $5,000 in bills.

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    These people are more likely to report they’ve had to take on extra work, change their living situation, or make other sacrifices.

    Overall, women between 18 and 35 who have had a baby in the past year and a half are twice as likely to have medical debt as women of the same age who haven’t given birth recently, other KFF research conducted for this project found.

    “You feel bad for the patient because you know that they want the best for their pregnancy,” said Eilean Attwood, a Rhode Island OB-GYN who said she routinely sees pregnant women anxious about going into debt.

    “So often, they may be coming to the office or the hospital with preexisting debt from school, from other financial pressures of starting adult life,” Attwood said. “They are having to make real choices, and what those real choices may entail can include the choice to not get certain services or medications or what may be needed for the care of themselves or their fetus.”

    Best-Laid Plans

    Crivilare and her husband, Andrew, also a teacher, anticipated some of the costs.

    The young couple settled in Jacksonville, in part because the farming community less than two hours north of St. Louis was the kind of place two public school teachers could afford a house. They saved aggressively. They bought life insurance.

    And before Crivilare got pregnant in 2021, they enrolled in the most robust health insurance plan they could, paying higher premiums to minimize their deductible and out-of-pocket costs.

    Then, two months before their baby was due, Crivilare learned she had developed preeclampsia. Her pregnancy would no longer be routine. Crivilare was put on blood pressure medication, and doctors at the local hospital recommended bed rest at a larger medical center in Springfield, about 35 miles away.

    “I remember thinking when they insisted that I ride an ambulance from Jacksonville to Springfield … ‘I’m never going to financially recover from this,’” she said. “‘But I want my baby to be OK.’”

    For weeks, Crivilare remained in the hospital alone as covid protocols limited visitors. Meanwhile, doctors steadily upped her medications while monitoring the fetus. It was, she said, “the scariest month of my life.”

    Fear turned to relief after her daughter, Rita, was born. The baby was small and had to spend nearly two weeks in the neonatal intensive care unit. But there were no complications. “We were incredibly lucky,” Crivilare said.

    When she and Rita finally came home, a stack of medical bills awaited. One was already past due.

    Crivilare rushed to set up payment plans with the hospitals in Jacksonville and Springfield, as well as the anesthesiologist, the surgeon, and the labs. Some providers demanded hundreds of dollars a month. Some settled for monthly payments of $20 or $25. Some pushed Crivilare to apply for new credit cards to pay the bills.

    “It was a blur of just being on the phone constantly with all the different people collecting money,” she recalled. “That was a nightmare.”

    Big Bills, Big Consequences

    The Crivilares’ bills weren’t unusual. Parents with private health coverage now face on average more than $3,000 in medical bills related to a pregnancy and childbirth that aren’t covered by insurance, researchers at the University of Michigan found.

    Out-of-pocket costs are even higher for families with a newborn who needs to stay in a neonatal ICU, averaging $5,000. And for 1 in 11 of these families, medical bills related to pregnancy and childbirth exceed $10,000, the researchers found.

    “This forces very difficult trade-offs for families,” said Michelle Moniz, a University of Michigan OB-GYN who worked on the study. “Even though they have insurance, they still have these very high bills.”

    Nationwide polls suggest millions of these families end up in debt, with sometimes devastating consequences.

    About three-quarters of U.S. adults with debt related to pregnancy or childbirth have cut spending on food, clothing, or other essentials, KFF polling found.

    About half have put off buying a home or delayed their own or their children’s education.

    These burdens have spurred calls to limit what families must pay out-of-pocket for medical care related to pregnancy and childbirth.

    In Massachusetts, state Sen. Cindy Friedman has proposed legislation to exempt all these bills from copays, deductibles, and other cost sharing. This would parallel federal rules that require health plans to cover recommended preventive services like annual physicals without cost sharing for patients. “We want … healthy children, and that starts with healthy mothers,” Friedman said. Massachusetts health insurers have warned the proposal will raise costs, but an independent state analysis estimated the bill would add only $1.24 to monthly insurance premiums.

    Tough Lessons

    For her part, Crivilare said she wishes new parents could catch their breath before paying down medical debt.

    “No one is in the right frame of mind to deal with that when they have a new baby,” she said, noting that college graduates get such a break. “When I graduated with my college degree, it was like: ‘Hey, new adult, it’s going to take you six months to kind of figure out your life, so we’ll give you this six-month grace period before your student loans kick in and you can get a job.’”

    Rita is now 2. The family scraped by on their payment plans, retiring the medical debt within a year, with help from Crivilare’s side job selling resources for teachers online.

    But they are now back in debt, after Rita’s recurrent ear infections required surgery last year, leaving the family with thousands of dollars in new medical bills.

    Crivilare said the stress has made her think twice about seeing a doctor, even for Rita. And, she added, she and her husband have decided their family is complete.

    “It’s not for us to have another child,” she said. “I just hope that we can put some of these big bills behind us and give [Rita] the life that we want to give her.”

    About This Project

    “Diagnosis: Debt” is a reporting partnership between KFF Health News and NPR exploring the scale, impact, and causes of medical debt in America.

    The series draws on original polling by KFF, court records, federal data on hospital finances, contracts obtained through public records requests, data on international health systems, and a yearlong investigation into the financial assistance and collection policies of more than 500 hospitals across the country. 

    Additional research was conducted by the Urban Institute, which analyzed credit bureau and other demographic data on poverty, race, and health status for KFF Health News to explore where medical debt is concentrated in the U.S. and what factors are associated with high debt levels.

    The JPMorgan Chase Institute analyzed records from a sampling of Chase credit card holders to look at how customers’ balances may be affected by major medical expenses. And the CED Project, a Denver nonprofit, worked with KFF Health News on a survey of its clients to explore links between medical debt and housing instability. 

    KFF Health News journalists worked with KFF public opinion researchers to design and analyze the “KFF Health Care Debt Survey.” The survey was conducted Feb. 25 through March 20, 2022, online and via telephone, in English and Spanish, among a nationally representative sample of 2,375 U.S. adults, including 1,292 adults with current health care debt and 382 adults who had health care debt in the past five years. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points for the full sample and 3 percentage points for those with current debt. For results based on subgroups, the margin of sampling error may be higher.

    Reporters from KFF Health News and NPR also conducted hundreds of interviews with patients across the country; spoke with physicians, health industry leaders, consumer advocates, debt lawyers, and researchers; and reviewed scores of studies and surveys about medical debt.

    KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

    Subscribe to KFF Health News’ free Morning Briefing.

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  • Antibiotics? Think Thrice

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    Antibiotics: Useful Even Less Often Than Previously Believed (And Still Just As Dangerous)

    You probably already know that antibiotics shouldn’t be taken unless absolutely necessary. Not only does taking antibiotics frivolously increase antibiotic resistance (which is bad, and kills people), but also…

    It’s entirely possible for the antibiotics to not only not help, but instead wipe out your gut’s “good bacteria” that were keeping other things in check.

    Those “other things” can include fungi like Candida albicans.

    Candida, which we all have in us to some degree, feeds on sugar (including the sugar formed from breaking down alcohol, by the way) and refined carbs. Then it grows, and puts its roots through your intestinal walls, linking with your neural system. Then it makes you crave the very things that will feed it and allow it to put bigger holes in your intestinal walls.

    Don’t believe us? Read: Candida albicans-Induced Epithelial Damage Mediates Translocation through Intestinal Barriers

    (That’s scientist-speak for “Candida puts holes in your intestines, and stuff can then go through those holes”)

    And as for how that comes about, it’s like we said:

    See also: Candida albicans as a commensal and opportunistic pathogen in the intestine

    That’s not all…

    And that’s just C. albicans, never mind things like C. diff. that can just outright kill you easily.

    We don’t have room to go into everything here, but you might like to check out:

    Four Ways Antibiotics Can Kill You

    It gets worse (now comes the new news)

    So, what are antibiotics good for? Surely, for clearing up chesty coughs, lower respiratory tract infections, right? It’s certainly one of the two things that antibiotics are most well-known for being good at and often necessary for (the other being preventing/treating sepsis, for example in serious and messy wounds).

    But wait…

    A large, nationwide (US) observational study of people who sought treatment in primary or urgent care settings for lower respiratory tract infections found…

    (drumroll please)

    the use of antibiotics provided no measurable impact on the severity or duration of coughs even if a bacterial infection was present.

    Read for yourself:

    Antibiotics Not Associated with Shorter Duration or Reduced Severity of Acute Lower Respiratory Tract Infection

    And in the words of the lead author of that study,

    ❝Lower respiratory tract infections tend to have the potential to be more dangerous, since about 3% to 5% of these patients have pneumonia. But not everyone has easy access at an initial visit to an X-ray, which may be the reason clinicians still give antibiotics without any other evidence of a bacterial infection.❞

    ~ Dr. Daniel Merenstein

    So, what’s to be done about this? On a large scale, Dr. Merenstein recommends:

    ❝Serious cough symptoms and how to treat them properly needs to be studied more, perhaps in a randomized clinical trial as this study was observational and there haven’t been any randomized trials looking at this issue since about 2012.❞

    ~ Dr. Daniel Merenstein

    This does remind us that, while not a RCT, there is a good ongoing observational study that everyone with a smartphone can participate in:

    Dr. Peter Small’s medical AI: “The Cough Doctor”

    In the meantime, he advises that when COVID and SARS have been ruled out, then “basic symptom-relieving medications plus time brings a resolution to most people’s infections”.

    You can read a lot more detail here:

    Antibiotics aren’t effective for most lower tract respiratory infections

    In summary…

    Sometimes, antibiotics really are a necessary and life-saving medication. But most of the time they’re not, and given their great potential for harm, they may be best simultaneously viewed as the very dangerous threat they also are, and used only when those “heavy guns” are truly what’s required.

    Take care!

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