Owning pets helps lonely seniors fight dementia

As people age, the risk of mental illness increases. Dementia is one of the most common. However, new research conducted in China has discovered something that could help prevent this type of disease.

The solution that Asian scientists have come up with is very simple and very interesting as well. In short, existence Pets Neighborhood has been shown to delay the development of dementia, especially in individuals over the age of 50 who live alone.

The academic work was published in JAMA Network Open and was carried out by scientists at Sun Yat-sen University, located in Guangzhou, China. Thus, experiments have shown that pets make a significant difference in verbal memory and fluency among older adults who do not have company at home.

“Owning pets offsets the association between living alone and lower rates of memory and verbal fluency,” said professor and study author Seung Lo.

Many volunteers participated in the search for pets

The whole work was quite comprehensive, and 7,900 participants over the age of 50 were involved in the process. Of this total, 35% were Pets 27% live alone. So, the main goal was to find out whether or not pets made a difference in these people's lives, and the results were extraordinary.

“Our findings suggest that pet ownership may be associated with slower cognitive decline among older adults living alone,” Seong said.

Next, having pets, such as cats and dogs, in the same environment is also associated with reduced feelings of loneliness, a major risk factor for cognitive loss and subsequent dementia. Therefore, older people who lived with others did not experience noticeable declines, which also proves the importance of animals.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there are more than 55 million patients in the four corners of the planet suffering from some type of dementia, and the first symptoms are usually confusion, forgetfulness, poor judgment of distances, and personality changes. Anxiety and losing track of time.

Finally, for Seung, more clinical studies are still needed to prove this thesis; However, the scenario they discovered is very encouraging and stimulating, justifying future research on the effect Pets In the elderly.