The feeling of grief can be crushing. Whether it be over a lost loved one, a diagnosis of sickness, or even knowing you or somebody you love has a terminal illness, and many, many more causes. At my high school last year, we lost a sophomore girl after she was struck by a car on a Friday night. The entire school was in shock  and it was very difficult to go to school and pretend like nothing tragic had happened. For two weeks after the accident, there were therapy dogs available in the counseling center. I found myself visiting them every day during my free periods, and feeling a lot happier when I left. I was thinking of this event the other day and that got me thinking: Do therapy dogs really help? I decided to look into it.

What I found was not shocking, considering my love for dogs. University of California Los Angeles, found that dogs easy anxiety and improve the health status of hospitalized heart failure patients. To determine the benefits of animal-assisted therapy, researchers studied 76 hospitalized heart failure patients and their reactions to visits from either a human volunteer and a dog team, a human volunteer only, or no visit (control group), and patients were randomly assigned to one of these groups. In each visit researchers measured the changes in cardiac function, neuroendocrine (a stress hormone) activation, and psychological changes in mood.

Each visit was 12 minutes, and the patients visited by the dogs were able to have them sit on their bed with the and pet them. Researchers monitored patients’ hemodynamics (collectives system of measurement for blood volume, heart function and resistance of the blood vessels), and this was measured before the interaction, eight minutes into the visit, and four minutes after. Investigators also measured epinephrine and norepinephrine levels at these three time points, and also had the patients participate in anxiety tests before and after the visit.

They found that anxiety scores dropped 24% for patients who were visited by the volunteer-dog team, volunteer-only group dropped 10% and the control group’s score had no change. The levels of the stress hormone dropped 17% in the volunteer-dog team group; 2% in the volunteer-only group; and rose an 7% in the control group.

The volunteer-dog team group showed improvement in norepinephrine levels, heart rate, and anxiety levels. “This study demonstrates that even a short-term exposure to dogs has beneficial
physiological and psychosocial effects on patients who want it,” Cole said. “This therapy
warrants serious consideration as an adjunct to medical therapy in hospitalized heart failure
patients. Dogs are a great comfort. They make people happier, calmer and feel more loved.
That is huge when you are scared and not feeling well,” said Kathie M. Cole, lead author of the study and a clinical nurse at the UCLA Medical Center in LA.

Also, twelve different breeds participated in this study which adds external validity. The breeds were: 2 golden retrievers, 1 Great Pyrenese, 1 Poodle, 1 German shephard, 1 dachshund, 2 labs, 1 irish setter, 1 Bernese Mountain dog, 1 border collie, and 1 mini schnauzer.

Also, in 2011, The University of Arizona did a study on the effect of a therapy dog on the effectiveness of a child life intervention with adolescents experiencing grief and loss. In this study, subjects were randomly assigned to one of two groups: the “pet therapy group” or the “control group.” The control group received the Child Life Intervention (3 one-hour sessions with a Certified Child Life Specialist), and the pet therapy group received the same intervention, but with a therapy dog present during the sessions. The mean pre-test score for the control group was 10.76; post-test mean score was 7.15, which shows a 34% improvement in mood scores. The mean pre-test score for the pet therapy group was 15.35, and the post-test score was 6.28, which shows a 59% improvement in mood scores, which overall shows how pet therapy is more effective in boosting mood than therapy without the dogs present.

I love dogs more than I love people most of the time, and I knew that dogs helped people even before I did all this research and discovered these studies. I watched animal assisted therapy help those around me and myself after the tragic accident at my high school. I hope that in these next couple of years, therapy dogs become more widely used.