Dallas – Charles Denson’s face brightens as a speckled Australian shepherd named Bart cuddles next to him while he rests in his hospital bed.
“You’ve got a pretty coat,” the 51-year-old heart patient says while stroking Bart’s soft fur.
New research indicates that hospitals that use such pet-therapy sessions aren’t barking up the wrong tree.
The novel study, presented Tuesday at an American Heart Association meeting, is one of the first to use scientific measurements to document that therapeutic dogs lower anxiety, stress and heart and lung pressure among heart-failure patients.
“You can see it on their face. First you see a smile, and then you see the worries of the world roll off their shoulders,” said Kathie Cole, a nurse at the University of California Los Angeles Medical Center who led the study.
Leslie Kern, director of cardiac research at Memorial Medical Center in Long Beach, Calif., said such visits help make patients’ lives more normal.
“I’m not surprised at all that something that makes people feel good also makes them feel less anxious (and) has measurable physiological effects,” said Dr. Marc Gillinov, a cardiac surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic who was not involved in the study.
Cole and her colleagues studied 76 heart-failure patients – average age 57 – who got a visit from a volunteer or from a volunteer plus a dog, or no visit.
The scientists measured patients’ physiological responses before, during and after visits.
Anxiety as measured by a standard rating scale dropped 24 percent for those visited by the dog and volunteer but only 10 percent for those visited by just a volunteer. The scores for the group with no visit remained the same.
Levels of epinephrine, a hormone the body makes under stress, dropped about 17 percent in patients visited by a person and a dog, and 2 percent in those visited by just a person. Levels rose about 7 percent in the group that didn’t get visitors.
Heart pressure dropped 10 percent after the visit by the volunteer and dog. It increased 3 percent for those visited by a volunteer and 5 percent for those who got no visit.
