Canine Comfort, Canine Care: Why Living With Dogs Helps Protect Against Dementia
Dementia and Daily Life
Dementia is terrifying. It is an illness with no real cure, and where other diseases affect our bodies, dementia slowly steals us from ourselves, echoing some of humanity’s oldest and most persistent fears: the loss of the soul, the slow death of love.
While we do have some medical treatments for specific conditions like Alzheimer’s Disease and Vascular Dementia, much of our best medical advice is about habits, lifestyle, and how we socialize. To treat—and more importantly to prevent—dementia, we have to change what our lives look like day-to-day.
Part of the reason for such an indirect approach is that we don’t have a solid grasp of the link between physical and mental symptoms. In other words, if you are living with dementia, your doctor will be able to run some tests and tell you, clearly and confidently, what’s happening in your brain. The science isn’t as clear when it comes to why those changes in your brain make you feel the way you do, or affect your function and abilities in the particular ways you’re experiencing.
At their most basic, diseases like Alzheimer’s kill brain cells and block the signaling between cells that lets our brain do things like remember, recognize, and react. But there’s a strange disconnect between how bad the brain damage is and how bad the symptoms are. Some people with very severe neurodegeneration function almost normally their entire lives, while others suffer severe losses of memory and changes to their moods, beliefs, and even physical movement.
Scientists sometimes talk about the mismatch in terms of “cognitive reserve,” which is just a made-up name for the fact that some people seem to be more resistant to dementia’s effects for reasons that don’t have any obvious or immediate connection to their brains.
Mind, Body, and Socializing
We don’t have a way to measure cognitive reserve, because it isn’t any one thing—it’s just a name for, roughly, “how well and how flexibly you can use your brain.” Sometimes we try to guesstimate it by measuring IQ, asking how mentally stimulating someone’s job is, or checking how many years they spent in education. Those are all factors that we think might contribute.
For most of us, though, we don’t have the luxury of going back to college or switching jobs just to make us more resistant to dementia. What else can we do?
Well, if this article’s title is to give away what comes next, there’s a canine connection to reducing dementia risk. But before we get to that, it’ll make more sense to cover the basics. There are three things that matter most:
- Keeping your mind busy. This doesn’t just mean doing Sudoku, it can be anything: working on your prize ’57 Bel Air, tracking sports statistics, reading Game of Thrones, leading the local Scout troupe, embroidery, whatever. Hell, if you do want to go back to school, lots of state colleges have extremely affordable programs to let older adults take a few classes here and there.
- Getting exercise. This one goes along with managing your weight, blood pressure, and blood sugar. Don’t drink too much, quit smoking. Get enough sleep. “Be baseline healthy,” basically.
- Hanging with friends. This is every bit as important as the other two. There’s no special requirement here: do whatever keeps you from feeling lonely. Friends, family, acquaintances, all good. Take your kids fishing, walk around the block and talk to all the neighbors, drop by the local bar for a drink.
Man’s Best Dementia Hack
Fact one: owning a dog can help alleviate the symptoms of depression and seems to protect against dementia.
Fact two: dogs are not magical. Just being near a dog does not do this. Instead, dogs change how our lives work, how our days are organized. They get us out of the house, give us a companion, demand that we pay attention to a being other than ourselves.
For example, for folks living with depression, having a dog can either make their symptoms better—about on par with the very best industrial-grade antidepressants—or it can make the symptoms even worse. The difference comes down to whether the person is well enough to take care of their pet. If you don’t have the baseline function to take the pup for a walk, you don’t get the exercise benefit. If you aren’t organized enough to keep them clean, safe, fed, watered, and occupied, all you have is something else to stress you out.
It’s much the same with dementia. One big study looked[1] at almost 12,000 older adults (65-84) living in Ota City, in Tokyo. They asked for basic info—age, gender, whether they lived with anyone—and whether each person currently owned a dog, a cat, both, or neither. They checked for dementia risk by looking at exercise habits, social contact, and physical frailty. Then, four years later, they used health insurance records to check whether each participant had developed dementia severe enough that they needed medical support.
Older adults with dogs were 40% less likely to have developed that level of dementia. Exercise and social contact still really mattered, though: folks with dogs and an exercise habit were 63% less likely to develop dementia, and folks with dogs and solid social connections were 59% less likely.
In the discussion, the authors say, more or less, “yeah, duh. You have to walk your dog and that means exercise, plus chances to talk to people.”
The study wasn’t airtight (they didn’t check for levels of cognitive function at the beginning, so it’s possible that people who’re mentally healthier were just more likely to own dogs in the first place). It was big, well-designed, and robust, though. It’s solid research.
Dogs are good for us.
