Every pet owner likely understands the emotional benefits of caring for a domestic animal, but new research suggests that owning a pet may be good for your physical health, too.
A recent analysis of data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which polled nearly 4,000 adults age 50 or over, found that women in particular who owned a cat or dog may be less likely to die of stroke or heart disease.
Some 35% of the people surveyed owned a dog, representative of the 46.3 million American households today that have at least one dog. While the cardiovascular benefits of taking the dog for a walk have long been thought to correlate with positive health benefits, the researchers of the present study actually found a stronger correlation between cat owners and good heart health.
“Anecdotally, we believe that walking a dog is good for heart, reducing life pressure and blood pressure as well,” said senior author Jian Zhang of Georgia Southern University. “I strongly believe that putative benefits of keeping a dog have not yet fully translated into reality, and we found that pet owners did not walk pets, certainly, dogs, more often than others,” Zhang said. “This explains why owning a dog did not reduce CVD mortality among dog owners.”
The relationship between cats and human health may have more to do with the cat owner’s personality than the effects of the feline itself, Zhang noted.
“We are short of overall assessment of the associations of companion animals with human health, and our study should not be interpreted to encourage more people to own pets, either dog or cat,” Zhang said. “Pets are good, but have to be kept responsibly.”
Other researchers are skeptical of the results, and stress that such claims should be taken with a grain of salt.
“Data from NHANES are really inadequate to settle the question, since one can only determine there was a pet in the household, but not the number of pets or whether the study participant was the owner, cared for it or interacted with it,” said Dr. Richard F. Gillum of Howard University College of Medicine in Washington D.C., who was not a part of the study. “So we need to wait for better studies before making any firm conclusions about pets and survival among their owners.”
For now, however, there’s certainly no reason not to go on loving and caring for your pets.