Many smokers who won’t kick the habit for their own health will do it for their pets, a new survey finds.

“We wanted to determine whether pet owners who learned that smoking is bad for their pet’s health would change their behavior,” said Sharon Milberger, an epidemiologist at the Henry Ford Health System Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention, and lead author of a report in the February online issue of Tobacco Control.

The answer was “yes” for nearly one in three of the pet-owning smokers surveyed by Milberger and her colleagues.

Almost 3,300 residents of southeastern Michigan responded to the online survey. One in five was a smoker, and more than one in four lived with a smoker.

Of the smokers, one in three said that knowing that smoking was bad for the health of a pet would prompt them to give it up. Almost one in 10 said they would ask a partner to quit, while one in seven said they would ask their partners to smoke only outdoors.

About four of 10 smokers and one in four of the nonsmokers living with someone who smoked said they be interested in information on the effects of smoking and how to stop.

“The results are encouraging,” Milberger said. “In two of every three homes in the United States, people have pets. That’s 70 million pets, and one in five lives with smokers.”

“It doesn’t surprise me,” said Carolynn MacAllister, a veterinarian at the Oklahoma State Cooperative Extension Service. “People think of their pets as family members.”

The American Veterinary Medical Association reported some years ago that 85 percent of people who own pets consider them to be family members, MacAllister said. “They don’t care as much about themselves as they do for family members, and they consider pets to be family members,” she said.

MacAllister cited studies showing an association between secondhand smoke and an increased risk of certain kinds of cancer in pets. One study found an increase of squamous cell carcinoma, a cancer of the mouth in cats, presumably related to the cancer-causing smoke-related molecules they lick up while grooming themselves. Another study found an increased incidence of nasal tumors among dogs living with smokers.

Milberger said her group has started an effort to see whether the pet effect can influence people to give up smoking.

“We are testing such an intervention,” she said. “We want to see if adding information on the effects of secondhand smoke on pets can change human behavior.”

Results of that intervention “should be available in six months to a year.” Milberger said.

By Ed Edelson, HealthDay Reporter
HealthDay

Copyright © 2009 ScoutNews, LLC. All rights reserved.
URL: http://health.msn.com/health-topics/quit-smoking/articlepage.aspx?cp-documentid=100232776

People love their pets. More than 60 percent of U.S. households include pets, and those pet owners pour $41 billion a year into pet care. This may seem like a lot of money. But when you consider the fact that owning a pet could very likely add years to your life, a pet can quickly seem like a wise investment.

According to a study by the Minnesota Stroke Institute that followed more than 4,000 cat owners over 10 years, owning a cat can dramatically reduce a person’s chance of dying from heart disease. Specifically, people who owned cats were 30 percent less likely to suffer a heart attack. Although those researchers cannot make the same conclusions about dogs based on the data they gathered, they suspect a dog study would provide similar results.

That study merely adds to the existing evidence that shows how animals can benefit human health. For example, psychologists have found reason to believe that owning a dog helps lower your blood pressure and your cholesterol. And other research shows that pets help us feel better overall and help us to deal with stress, which can be a source of illness.

And let’s not forget the benefits for the elderly. For example, one study observed neural activity in seniors while they walked or interacted with a dog. It turned out that walking with a dog gave seniors a boost in parasympathetic nervous system activity, which is good because the parasympathetic nervous system helps calm and rest the body.

The psychological benefits of pets can make a big difference in someone’s life. This seems to be especially true for kids who are struggling to deal with death or illness in the family. Certain studies have concluded that children with dogs cope better with these serious situations. Researchers believe this probably has to do with the obvious fact that pets provide love and with the fact that the structured routine required for taking care of a pet is a positive for the child. Kids aren’t the only ones who benefit from pets during these difficult times; the spouses of cancer patients said they believed pets helped them cope as well.

Many programs throughout the U.S. allow prisoners to train dogs to perform services for disabled people. Not only does this help organizations meet the demand for service dogs, but it can rehabilitate prisoners, contributing to better behavior.

The health benefits of dogs go beyond psychological factors. As it turns out, dogs might be useful in the field of medicine to detect and predict medical problems. In one study, trained dogs were able to identify patients with bladder cancer by smelling their urine. Although the dogs were not accurate all the time, they identified the right patients at a rate much better than chance. This revealed surprising evidence for the use of dogs as well as further knowledge about the effects and detection of bladder cancer.

What’s perhaps more amazing, however, is that certain dogs can predict when their owner is about to suffer an epileptic seizure. Trainers can teach some dogs to help a person in various ways during a seizure. In addition, some of these dogs end up developing the mysterious ability to actually warn the owner before he or she suffers a seizure. The group that trains these dogs, Canine Assistants, claims that most dogs develop the prediction abilities within merely a year of being with their owner. Researchers are at a loss to explain how exactly dogs can do this.

For whatever reason, anecdotal data as well as studies have consistently showen that pets certainly can have a special effect on their owners. Take the best care of your pet as possible by including Poly-MVA for Pets in their daily diet. To learn more about the benefits of Poly-MVA for Pets, click here.

Learning how to easily give oral supplements (and medications when needed) to a pet is a helpful trick to know. Use the following tips to help you give either liquids or pills to your pet.

Liquids

Step 1: Restrain the pet. If the pet is hard to handle, you may need help restraining it.

Step 1a: Relieve the pet’s apprehension by talking quietly and reassuringly.

Step 1b: Slip one arm under the pet’s neck, holding its throat gently in the crook of your arm. Be sure the pet can breathe easily.

Step 1c: Pass the other arm over or under the middle of the pet, using gentle but firm pressure to hold its body against yours.

Step 1d: If necessary, apply a mouth-tie loosely so there is only slight jaw movement.

Step 2: Gently tip the pet’s head slightly backward.

Step 3: Pull the pet’s lower lip out at the corner to make a pouch.

Step 4: Using a plastic eyedropper or dose syringe, place the fluid a little at a time into the pouch, allowing each small amount to be swallowed before giving any more of the dose. (As a side note, all orders of Poly-MVA for Pets include a dropper upon request.)

Step 5: Gently rub the pet’s throat to stimulate swallowing.

Pills

Step 1: Restrain the pet. If the pet is hard to handle, you may need help restraining it.

Step 1a: Relieve the pet’s apprehension by talking quietly and reassuringly.

Step 2: Grasp the pet’s upper jaw with one hand over its muzzle.

Step 3: Press the pet’s lips over the upper teeth by pressing your thumb on one side and your fingers on the other so the pet’s lips are between its teeth and your fingers. Apply firm pressure to force its mouth open.

Step 4: Hold the pill between the thumb and index finger of your other hand, and place the pill as far back in the pet’s mouth as possible.

Step 5: Gently rub the pet’s throat to stimulate swallowing.

An alternate and popular method is to hide the pill in a yummy treat.

A team of veterinarians has found a surprising link between compulsive tail-chasing in dogs and high cholesterol, according to a study published in the March issue of the Journal of Small Animal Practice.

The finding adds to a growing body of evidence — mostly from studies on humans — that high cholesterol may be a marker for behavioral problems such as panic attacks and obsessive compulsive disorder, which could be expressed by frequent tail-chasing falls in dogs.

Bouts of tail-chasing can also occur after a dog experiences physical trauma, surgery or illness, noted Hasan Batmaz, a member of the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine at Turkey’s University of Uludag, who conducted the study along with a team of colleagues.

Certain breeds, such as bull terriers and German shepherds, seem to chase their tails more often than others.

For the study, the researchers took blood samples from 15 otherwise healthy dogs that were compulsive tail-chasers. To serve as controls, 15 dogs that rarely chase their tails were included in the study as well.

The tail-chasers had significantly higher cholesterol numbers — including both HDL and LDL — compared with the control dogs, the researchers found.

The reason, they said, could be that high cholesterol levels glob up cell membranes at the microscopic level, affecting the flow of brain hormones such as serotonin that are involved in mood and behavior.

Female dogs were more likely to be obsessive tail-chasers, but the researchers aren’t sure why.

Past studies have found that people with panic disorders and certain phobias often have higher cholesterol levels, possibly as a result of increased activity of hormones tied to the “fight or flight” response.

Lisa Peterson, a longtime dog breeder who is director of communications for the American Kennel Club, was surprised by the new study.

“It’s an interesting hypothesis, especially as we don’t usually test for cholesterol in dogs,” she told Discovery News.

Peterson explained that since high cholesterol in dogs doesn’t always lead to the same health issues as it does in humans, such as clogged arteries, dogs aren’t tested for their serum lipid levels as part of their annual wellness exams.

“Blood pressure isn’t usually measured for dogs either, unless the dog is exhibiting extreme symptoms,” she added.

As for tail-chasing, she said, “this is usually just a puppy thing that happens when young pups discover they have a tail.”

But when tail-chasing becomes compulsive, she said the behavior could be due to “nature or nurture,” meaning genetic or environmental causes, including “a stressful incident trigger.”

Although a change to a lower fat diet could help alleviate compulsive tail-chasing in dogs, Peterson doubts high cholesterol is always a result of overeating, since “manufactured pet foods must all meet governmental regulations for protein, ash, fat and water content, and more.”

Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News

URL: http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/03/24/dog-tail-chasing.html