Nancy Gee, executive director of the Center for Human-Animal Interaction at VCU
According to a recent study from the VCU School of Medicine, there is even more reason to appreciate your canine companion. Published in the journal Frontiers in Psychiatry last December, the findings suggest that visits from therapy dogs can decrease loneliness in hospitalized psychiatric patients.
“There is something special and unique about having a dog in a hospital setting. ... It’s a little bit like home,” says Nancy Gee, executive director of the Center for Human-Animal Interaction at VCU and lead author on the study. “It’s an opportunity [for patients] to just relax and be in the moment.”
The study was done in collaboration with VCU Health’s Dogs on Call program, which for 25 years has paired trained pups and handlers to comfort patients and health care workers alike.
Over five days, Gee’s research team conducted a randomized clinical trial at VCU Health. Sixty patients in psychiatric care received 20-minute visits from a dog and its handler, visits from the handler alone, or standard care. After assessing the patients’ loneliness via the survey-driven UCLA Loneliness Scale before and after each visit, researchers found that the furry friends had the greatest positive impact on the patients, lowering their sense of loneliness.
Dogs play a healing role in the hospital, thanks to the Dogs on Call program from VCU Health.
In early 2022, when staff in the hospital’s psychiatric unit began soliciting participants for the study, Gee notes that the interest was overwhelming. “It actually got to the point where we didn’t have enough handlers to do all the study visits,” she says.
Gee also found that the patients weren’t the only ones benefiting from the interactions. During each visit, “both the humans and the animals secrete oxytocin, which is kind of this feel-good bonding [hormone], and both have reductions in cortisol, which is the stress hormone,” she says.
A key part of the study was relying on the dogs’ training to intuit care needs. When handlers brought the dogs into a hospital room, the animals’ heightened senses allowed them to detect human emotional distress and respond with nurturing behavior as they saw fit. “For instance, they may go into a room, and they’ve had a request to visit a patient, but they get into the room, and the dog beelines right over to the family member,” Gee says. “I think they’re better at reading the room than we are.”
Gee has already identified future research questions she hopes to answer. “I want to investigate the [therapy] mechanism,” she says. “I want to look at the underlying theory. What’s happening here that this dog is having this impact?”
One reason behind the benefit, Gee thinks, could be that dogs aren’t judging us. “At the end of the day, when you come home, when your dog greets you at the door, you could have had the worst day in the world, and your dog still loves you,” she says.
