Walking dogs keeps elderly active

Senior citizens who live with dogs appear to meet internationally recognized exercise goals just by walking them, a new study suggests.

“It’s very difficult to find any other intervention that produces this size of effect,” said senior author Dr. Daniel Simon Mills, a professor of veterinary behavioral medicine at the University of Lincoln in England.

“It’s good evidence that dog ownership amongst the elderly increases physical activity in a meaningful and healthy way,” he said in a video call.

Participants in the study were 65 to 81 years old, lived independently in one of three counties in England and wore monitors that measured their movements for three one-week periods over the course of a year.

The time periods were designed to capture participants’ steps in different seasons and under varied weather conditions, researchers reported in BioMed Central Public Health. Dog owners walked on average 21 minutes more than those without dogs at an at-least moderate pace, the study found.

“Virtually all of the increased exercise is not just dawdling,” Mills said. “It’s marching.” Over the course of a week, the additional 147 minutes dog owners spent walking at a moderate pace would in itself be just three minutes shy of World Health Organization recommendations of at least 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous weekly physical activity, the study authors note.

But Marcia Stefanick, a professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine in California, hesitated to ascribe all the benefits to the dogs. “Despite ‘successful matching’ on what the authors consider key variables, a person who is ready and willing to walk a dog at least twice a day is more likely to get a dog than one who sees that commitment as too challenging,” said Stefanick, who researches disease prevention and was not involved in the study.