Dogs For Treating Dementia

Animal-assisted interventions may help elderly dementia patients socialize with human beings more easily, a recently reported study from Germany finds.

Investigator Sandra Wesenberg, research associate at the Faculty of Education at Technische Universität Dresden in Germany, who will have been awarded her doctor's degree by the time this article is published, reports that nursing home residents who received weekly therapy visits with both a human therapist and a therapy dog for six months had longer periods of attention to people around them, physical contact, and conversation than nursing home residents who had received weekly visits from a therapist without a dog.

Soon-to-be Dr. Wesenberg presented her results to the International Congress of the Royal College of Psychiatrists (RCPsych) 2014 in London.

Researching a "Common Sense" But Untested Behavioral Therapy

Wesenberg noted that nursing homes have been using animal-assisted interventions for a number of years but there has been very little study of how well they work.

"For a long time, research on the potentially beneficial bio-psycho-social effects of [these] interventions on people with dementia was limited to individual case reports, practical reports, and field studies with very small sample sizes," Wesenberg and her collaborators write.

The researchers visited the dementia patients in groups of four and used a standardized program called Pet Encounters, which involves dogs and owners specially trained to interact with people who have dementia for the first six months of the study.

For the second six months of the study, the researchers used a similar program without the dogs. Sessions were videotaped and coded for length of interpersonal contact and emotional expression.

Wesenberg and her colleagues found that both interventions produced positive benefits for the participants, but there were greater improvements when the therapists and specially trained volunteers brought their specially trained dogs.

People Say Yes to Pets

Why animal-assisted interventions help with dementia is a question that the researchers cannot yet answer. Maybe the dog is a conversation piece. Living in a nursing home with dementia, after all, does not give the nursing home resident a lot to talk about. Perhaps therapy dogs improve social interaction by providing a topic of conversation.

Or maybe nursing home residents who have dementia simply feel they can interact with the dog more easily than with people. Dogs, after all, don't require high intellectual facility with human language for communication. Even if you can't communicate with another human being very well, maybe you can still communicate with a dog.

See Also: Ways Pets Make You Healthier

People who have dementia can behave in ways that dogs (and other humans) have trouble understanding, and dogs that are not specially trained for use in providing company to older persons with cognitive disabilities could bark, bite, run away, urinate, defecate, or damage furniture. It takes a special dog to deal with special people, some experts suggest.

Ten Principles For Using Service Animals In Elder Care

One of the best ways to get professional advice on the use of pets in assisting older family members and friends who have Alzheimer's disease or other forms of dementia is to contact Pet Partners, at the link posted below this article. However, if you are working on your own, here are 10 more important considerations for a successful animal-assisted intervention.

1. Work with an animal who is familiar with, and gentle with, children and unpredictable adults. Aggressive animals simply have to be excluded from elder care.
2. Cats are not well suited to elder care. Many older adults have thin skin, or have to take anticoagulant (blood thinning) medications. Kitty claws and older people are not a good combination, and a single cat scratch could set back progress with older adult, and result in injury to the cat. Unless the cat already knows the elder, keep cats at home.
3. Bring just one dog to the therapy session. Dogs are territorial and competitive. You don't want the chaos that multiple dogs could bring to the session.
4. Let your dog become familiar with the "lay of the land" before bringing the animal to meet seniors. Your dog needs to be familiar with the smells, sights, and sounds of the nursing home before interaction with seniors to avoid upset to the dog and to the residents of the home.
5. Make sure the people you are visiting with your therapy dog are not afraid of or allergic to dogs. Try to bring dogs to visit people who have had dogs as pets, and who have had happy experiences with dogs. 
6. Let elders know you are bringing dogs before you take the dog into the room. Even if they do not respond to the announcement, it is a good idea to prepare the elder for the encounter.
7. Sometimes older people forget how to interact with dogs. If the elder pinches the dog, or pulls its ears, or hits or yells at it, remove the dog from the room, for the protection of the dog and the elder. This is not a sign of cruelty. It is just sometimes a manifestation of the disease.
8. Don't make the dog do all the work. It is still up to you to make small talk with the elderly people you are visiting. Don't force the conversation to be about the dog. But allow elders all the happy interaction they can muster with their new canine friend.
9. Know that seniors who have dementia may be "with it" one moment and emotionally absent the next. It's not personal. Value the interaction you have when you have it.
10. And realize that progress may be slow and in small increments. Age-related cognitive decline is a devastating disease. You may see little progress between visits. However, you may be reopening worlds of communication for that elderly person and their spouses, family members, and friends in ways that make the condition much easier to bear for all involved.

See Also: Active Brain Keeps Dementia Away