The Impact of Pet Ownership on the Functional Transitions Among Elderly. P Raina Ph.D (cand.) Waltham Fellow., D. Waltner-Toews Ph.D., B. Bonnett Ph.D., Dept. of Population Med., U. of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario. CANADA. (Paper presented at the 7th International Conference on Human-Animal Interactions, Animals, Health and Quality of Life, September 6-9, 1995, Geneva, Switzerland.)

The ability to perform routine activities of daily living (ADL) is an important aspect of health status and quality of life. The limitations in daily activities is not always permanent; some experience a return of lost functional capacity. One purpose of this paper is to examine transitions in ADL in a longitudinal study and secondly to examine the impact of pet ownership status on the ADL among the elderly after controlling for initial ADL, other risk factors and confounders.

A longitudinal study of community dwelling elderly (65+) was conducted to assess the impact of pet ownership on the health and health care use. Two interviews were conducted 12 months apart by trained telephone interviewers using a standardized multidimensional health survey. Total of 1054 community dwelling elderly were interviewed at time 1 and 995 were interviewed at time 2 resulting in attrition of 6%.

The study sample was 51 % females. The mean age of the sample was 73 (s.d=6.3; range: 65-93), with the following age distribution: 65-69, 34%; 70-74, 32%; 75-79, 18%; over 80, 16%. Total of 25% of the elderly owned pets and majority of them were dog or cat owners. The average score attained on ADL at time 1 and time 2 were 48 (s.d=5.3) and 46 (s.d=6.2) respectively.

The possible range of attainable scores on ADL scale is between 13 and 52. The low scores indicates poor ADL. Among elderly respondents in this study, 30% deteriorated, 45% improved and 25% remained unchanged in their ADL status over 12 months period respectively. These transitions were significantly associated with age groups when startified by gender (males: X26=26.85, p=0.0002; females: X26=14.3, p=0.026). The relationship between pet ownership and change in ADL was examined using transitional multivariable regression analysis.

The pet ownership was entered as a dichotomous variable with pet owners being a reference category. The significant association was found between pet ownership variable and ADL at time 2 (b= -0.56, p=0.02, model R2=0.72) after adjusting for the baseline ADL, other risk factors and confounders.

In conclusion this results of this study highlights the patterns of transitions in AOL and also show that the pet owners are likely to have better ADL as compared to the non-pet owners.