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Zezhang Lin

Professor Ray

Composition II

26 September 2017

Dog and Dementia

Dementia is a horrible disease for everyone. According to World Health Organization,

around 47 million people worldwide have dementia, and this number is increasing every year. It

is important to research how to prevent and treat dementia, and animal-assisted intervention is

one of those research projects. The main symptom of dementia are memory loss, cant focus and

have problem to communicate (Alzheimer's Association) . People with dementia need to be

taken care of, they dont have ability to live by themselves. I found three academic journals that

talk about dog-assisted therapy, contents include bring therapy dogs to older people with

dementia, research effects of dog-assisted intervention on behavioural and psychological

symptoms of dementia, and review articles about dog-assisted therapy research, their object is to

prove if dog-assisted therapy is effective.

In the review article, In another article Effects of Dog-Assisted Intervention on

Behavioural and Psychological Symptoms of Dementia by Lena Nordgren and Gabriella

Engstrm, they mention you can use drugs to treat dementia. However, medications often have

limited effects, harmful side effects and even increase mortality (Nordgren and Engstrm 31) . In

the third article 'Bringing Respite in the Burden of Illness' Dog Handlers' Experience of

Visiting Older Persons with Dementia Together with a Therapy Dog by Anna Swall and her

colleagues, they discover that pets have been found to alleviate loneliness, reduce blood pressure
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from former researches (Swall et al. 2224) . It proves maybe people can use pets to ease

dementia. And also because the traditional treatment - medications has very limited effects to

dementia and could cause side effects (Nordgren and Engstrm 31) , they start researching

animal-assisted intervention. Dogs can read a persons body language despite the person's

inabilities and does not judge (Swall et al. 2224) which becomes the prime project.

For determine if dog-assisted therapy is effective, these three articles use different

methods.

In the article by Swall, their method is let nine dog handlers visiting persons with

dementia, and collect data from interviews with them. Dog handlers use their skills and

knowledge to get close to patients and create a special relationship with them. To prove their

theory, they pick some passages from interviews and put them in the article. The passage

describes in detail the communication between the handler, the therapy dog and the patient, such

as when the handler met a woman who is extremely difficult to communicate. One passage states

she opened the door at once and says, Come in, come in. . . and she sits down and she had

been waiting for us to come . . . and I just ask if its OK to get the dog to sit next to her . . . the

dog pushed a little on her, get her to start caressing, . . . and finally he sat on her lap. And then

she said to me, 'My dad was not kind . . .' (Swall et al. 2228). With the dogs help, the

communication becomes easier.

Different from the former, in the article by Nordgren and Engstrm, they dont collect

data from dog handlers, they collect from eight nursing homes in the Sweden. A total of 33

residents, 20 in the dog-assisted intervention group and 13 in the control group (without

dog-assisted intervention), the intervention comprised of ten sessions, lasting between 45 and 60
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minutes, once or twice a week. They made a table with data follow up to six months after

dog-assisted intervention, including physical state and psychological state with two different

groups (Nordgren and Engstrm 36) . Through the table, some positive tendencies were

observed, the CMAI (Cohen-Mansfield Agitation Inventory) mean score for physical

non-aggressive behaviours decreased from 18.5 to 15.3, mean and median MDDAS

(Multi-Dimensional Dementia Assessment Scale) scores for behavioural symptoms also

decreased. But compare to the control group, the effect is not significant. And most of p values in

the table are bigger than 0.05, which means most of results cant be considered statistically

significant.

The review article by Perkins, its most special one. Instead collecting data from dog

handlers or patients, they collect data from other articles that focus on dog-assisted therapy to

determine if dog-assisted therapy is effective. By using their electronic database they find nine

studies that met the inclusion criteria. And they also make a table to summary those studies

(Perkins et al. 177) . In the table, they indicate first author and year, number of patients, setting

(residential care, special care unit or hospital), country, patients age, measures, findings and so

on, you can easily find each studys result from findings, then you can make conjectures, think

about which measure is useful and which age group gets most significant effect.

The article by Nordgren is focus on data comparison, they get result by comparing every

single data. The Swalls article is better at analysis and speculation. The review article by Perkin

is the most comprehensive one. Unlike other two articles that only focus on their interviews or

data. The review article need consider more factors, from the table, you can see studies they
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found covered around the world. They need to compare every article, think about different

factors, and even consider the type of dog could influence the research (Perkins et al. 180) .

Perkins review article also have deficiency, his paper is all about other articles of

dementia, there is no a single experiment in his article is done by he or his team, though those

datas he sums up are very remarkable, but none of those datas are collected by he or his team,

its hard to convince people with other peoples result, make this article have less persuasion.

The other two article both collect datas by themselves, their deficiency is range of experiment is

too one-sided. They only consider about can the therapy dog be helpful for dementia, they miss

too many factors such as environment and types of dog, which are considered in Perkins article.

The Swalls article only has a few of datas, makes the article more less persuasion

Though all of these articles result state dog-assisted intervention may provide some help

to dementia, since the sample size is small, its hard to determine. In Nordgrens article, the

mean score for verbal agitation increased immediately after DAI(dog-assisted intervention) ,

after which it decreased close to baseline level at three-month follow up but then increased again

at six-month follow up, they dont even know how to explain why it increased after decreasing

(Nordgren and Engstrm 37) , so dog-assisted intervention also could be unstable.

So far, it is still hard to tell dog-assisted intervention can replace pharmacological

treatments, but it has potential.

Work Cited

Nordgren, Lena, and Gabriella Engstrm . Effects of Dog-Assisted Intervention on Behavioural

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and Psychological Symptoms of Dementia. Nursing Older People, vol. 26, ser. 3, Apr.

2014, pp. 3138. 3.

Perkins, Jacqueline, et al. Dog-Assisted Therapy for Older People with Dementia: A Review.

Australasian Journal on Ageing, vol. 27, ser. 4, Dec. 2008, pp. 177182.4,

doi:10.1111/j.1741-6612.2008.00317.x.

Swall, Anna, et al. Bringing Respite in the Burden of Illness Dog Handlers Experience of

Visiting Older Persons with Dementia Together with a Therapy Dog. Journal of Clinical

Nursing, 14 Feb. 2016, pp. 22232231., doi:10.1111/jocn.13261.

World Health Organization (2017) Dementia. tinyurl.com/lh3h4b3 (Last accessed: September

19 2017.)

Dementia | Signs, Symptoms & Diagnosis. Alzheimer's Association,

www.alz.org/what-is-dementia.asp.