Studies Show Owning A Dog Will Lower Your Risk Of Dying Early

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Own a dog? If you do, you just increased your chances of living longer by a whopping 24%, studies show.

“Our analysis found having a dog is actually protective against dying of any cause,” said Mount Sinai endocrinologist Dr. Caroline Kramer, lead author of a new systematic review of nearly 70 years of global research published Tuesday in “Circulation,” a journal of the American Heart Association.
The studies looked at over 4 million people from the United States, Canada, Scandinavia, New Zealand, Australia and the United Kingdom.
“Dog ownership was associated with a 24% reduction in all cause mortality,” said Kramer, an assistant professor in the division of endocrinology and metabolism at the University of Toronto.
The analysis found an even larger benefit for people who had already suffered a heart attack or stroke.
“For those people, having a dog was even more beneficial. They had a 31% reduced risk of dying from cardiovascular disease,” Kramer said.
The studies went on to find that people who owned dogs had better health outcomes after suffering a major cardiovascular event such as heart attack or stroke.
However, the group of people who had the best results in the study were those who lived alone and had a dog or dogs.
“The most interesting part of this study was that people who lived alone actually seem to get the greatest benefit in both the heart attack group and the stroke group,” said dog owner Dr. Martha Gulati, who is the editor-in-chief of CardioSmart.org, the American College of Cardiology’s patient education platform.
“People who lived with a dog actually had less mortality than people living alone who didn’t have a dog,” said Gulati, who was not involved in either study.
So the moral of the story/study, if you don’t have a dog right now — get one!