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.
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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Reference
Source 89
November
15, 2005
