[ad_1]
By Brett Arends
If you are over 50, live alone, and want to keep your mind as young as possible for as long as possible, get a pet. That is the big conclusion of a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Just having a pet made a notable difference in the rate of cognitive decline among older adults who lived alone, a team of eight researchers in epidemiology and medical statistics found after following the cases of nearly 8,000 older adults. Even more surprising is that the beneficial influence of pet ownership manifested itself only over a nine-year period, giving an idea of how much effect it could have in 20 years or more.
And cognitive decline is not only a bad thing in itself, it is also often a precursor to full-blown dementia.
“Association with pets was associated with slower rates of decline in composite verbal cognition, verbal memory, and verbal fluency among people living alone,” write Dr. Ciyong Lu and colleagues from the School of Public Health at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou. Porcelain. This came after he crunched the numbers from a major health research project in Britain, the English Longitudinal Study of Aging.
Participants in the study had an average age of 66 years and just over half were women. They were interviewed every two years. The study followed them from 2010-2011 to 2018-2019.
Those who lived alone and did not have a pet fared worse in terms of cognitive decline on several measures. But those who lived alone and had a pet did just as well as those who lived with other people.
This is not an isolated study either.
A scientific paper published two years ago in the Journal of Aging and Health found that among a sample of people over the age of 65, those who had owned a pet for at least five years “demonstrated higher composite cognitive scores, compared to those who “They didn’t have a pet.” ” while “sustained pet ownership was associated with higher immediate and delayed word recall scores.”
A 2020 study found that among a group of over-50s, those who owned a pet or had regular contact with a pet showed “better cognitive status compared to those who did not own pets or had regular contact with them regardless of age.”
Another 2016 study found a “significant positive correlation between pet attachment and executive function” among homebound older adults, meaning it wasn’t enough to have a pet, you had to have an emotional attachment. to her.
Perhaps most surprising, a study of about 100 adults of all ages found that “pet ownership can reduce brain age by up to 15 years.” In the sample, the authors found that “pet ownership was related to higher levels of cognition and larger brain structures, and these effects were greater in dog owners.” The researchers found that benefits could be found in “better processing speed, attentional orienting, and episodic memory for stories” and in other measures of brain health.
All of these studies have obvious and unavoidable limitations, which is that the authors often use cautious language, such as saying that having a pet is “associated” with better cognitive scores rather than causing them. (In theory, better cognitive scores could be the cause of having a pet.) Many involve small samples of only one hundred or a few hundred individuals. And there is a lot that can be demonstrated using real-world studies, where researchers have to rely on subjects’ reports.
However, the growing number of studies pointing in the same direction should be a cause for hope. This is especially true as we face growing and related epidemics of aging, loneliness and dementia.
The percentage of Americans living alone has increased by nearly half in the last 50 years. Today it is almost 30%. The number of people with dementia worldwide is expected to triple in the next 25 years. Scientists still know very little about its cause and effective treatments are rare, very expensive and of limited use.
Let the pets come.
-Brett Arends
This content was created by MarketWatch, operated by Dow Jones & Co. MarketWatch is published independently of Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.
(END) Dow Jones News
01-26-24 0601ET
Copyright (c) 2024 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.