It’s good to have a dog. Risk of serious diseases lowered
It’s common knowledge that having a four-legged friend has many benefits. Recent studies have shown that growing up with one can have a positive impact on mental health.
Experts at Johns Hopkins Medicine have shown that having a pooch from a young age can benefit a person's mental health. It turns out that a furry friend can reduce the risk of developing schizophrenia in adulthood.
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"Serious psychiatric disorders have been associated with alterations in the immune system linked to environmental exposures in early life, and since household pets are often among the first things with which children have close contact, it was logical for us to explore the possibilities of a connection between the two," says Robert Yolken, head of the Stanley Division of Developmental Neurovirology and professor of neurovirology, in a media interview.
Dogs help with mental health
Specialists at Johns Hopkins Medicine wanted to discover how dogs can influence a child's neurological development. As reported by ekologia.pl, to investigate this issue Yolken and colleagues analysed the relationship between pet ownership in the first 12 years of life and a later diagnosis of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.
The study involved 1,371 men and women aged between 18 and 65 years. They were divided into three groups:
- 381 with a diagnosis of bipolar affective disorder,
- 396 with a diagnosis of schizophrenia,
- 594 controls.
The researchers included all relevant information about the participants. Documented information included age, gender, place of birth, race/ethnicity and highest level of parental education (as a measure of socioeconomic status). In addition, the participants had to answer a question about whether they had a dog in their first 12 years of life.
Results of the study
As we can read on ekologia.pl, the study found a link between having a dog in the early years of life and a reduced likelihood of developing a neurological condition. Robert Yolken reported that people who had a dog before the age of 13 were as much as 24 per cent less likely to develop schizophrenia than those who did not own a pet.
The researchers stress that it is not entirely clear how owning a dog and a lower risk of schizophrenia are linked. They say more careful analysis is needed to understand this.
"There are several plausible explanations for this possible 'protective' effect from contact with dogs - perhaps something in the canine microbiome that gets passed to humans and bolsters the immune system against or subdues a genetic predisposition to schizophrenia," says Robert Yolken.
Source: ekologia.pl
