Owning pets—especially dogs—helps heart patients manage their risk factors
Research published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings: Innovations, Quality & Outcomes this month suggests owning a pet—in particular a dog—can be beneficial for cardiovascular health.
First author Andrea Maugeri, PhD, a researcher with the International Clinical Research Center at St. Anne’s University Hospital in Brno, Czech Republic, and her colleagues studied the link between pet ownership and CVD risk factors among 1,769 subjects enrolled in the Kardiovize Brno 2030 study. At baseline, subjects had no history of CVD.
Maugeri and co-authors assessed participants’ CV health according to the American Heart Association’s “Life’s Simple 7”—a handful of factors the organization deems essential for optimal heart health. In line with those guidelines, the researchers tracked subjects’ BMI, diet, physical activity, smoking status, blood pressure, blood glucose and total cholesterol.
“It has been proposed that owning a pet might prevent obesity, improve lipid profiles and reduce systemic blood pressure, thereby reducing risk of mortality and CVD events,” the authors wrote in their paper. “Previous studies have shown that people who own a dog engage in more physical activity than non-owners.”
Around 42% of Maugeri et al.’s study population owned any type of pet, the majority of which were dogs (24.3%). Other animals made up 17.9% of the pool, but the authors didn’t specify which animals those were.
Analysis revealed pet owners, and specifically dog owners, were more likely to report exercise, good diets, ideal blood glucose levels and reduced smoking, resulting in a higher CV health score than non-pet owners. Compared with owners of pets that weren’t dogs, dog owners were more likely to report optimum physical activity and diet.
“Overall, these findings suggested a positive effect of owning a dog on several behavioral and clinical CVD risk factors,” Maugeri and colleagues wrote. “However, CVDs are often multifactorial and previous studies did not evaluate the potential relationship between pet or dog ownership with CV health status, a composite measure that takes into account both clinical parameters and behaviors. To fill this gap, we assessed the bivariate association between pet ownership and CV health, showing higher CV health scores among pet owners compared with people who did not own a pet.”
After graduating from Indiana University-Bloomington with a bachelor’s in journalism, Anicka joined TriMed’s Chicago team in 2017 covering cardiology. Close to her heart is long-form journalism, Pilot G-2 pens, dark chocolate and her dog Harper Lee.