Pets might lower your heart disease risk

http://www.today.com/health/pets-might-lower-your-heart-disease-risk-experts-say-1C9866275

May 10, 2013

They’re happy to see you when you get home, love you unconditionally and make you get up from the couch to take a walk. And there’s a growing body of evidence that pets can lower your risk of heart disease, too, the American Heart Association says.

The group says there’s now enough evidence that pets are heart-healthy to justify an official statement summing up the evidence.

“The most data and the best data were on dog ownership,” said Dr. Glenn Levine of Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, who led the committee that wrote the statement. “In no way are we discounting or dissing cats or other pets,” Levine added hastily.

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Despite the evidence, the group doesn’t yet recommend that people adopt pets simply to lower their risk of heart disease. “We did not want people to see this article and just go out and adopt or rescue or buy a dog …while they continue to just sit on the couch and smoke cigarettes,” Levine said.

“The primary reason to adopt a pet would be to give the pet a loving home and to derive a measure of enjoyment from taking care of a pet.”

And although dog owners are far more likely to get out and exercise with their pets than, say, a snake owner, Levine said any pet can be helpful. “Several studies demonstrated beneficial effects on these parameters associated with goat, fish, chimpanzee, and snake ownership,’ the statement reads.

“One experiment even demonstrated a benefit on cardiovascular stress responses with ‘virtual’ animals, which were presented in the form of video recordings.”