The Pet-Pain Study: How Caring for a Dog Affects Quality of Life, Pain, and Depression in Patients With Inflammatory Arthritis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Treatment options for rheumatoid arthritis (RA), spondyloarthritis (SpA) and psoriatic arthritis (PsA) have improved with the introduction of biologic and targeted synthetic disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs.Although a good clinical response and even remission can be achieved in most cases, a low quality of life (QOL), depression, and chronic pain often persist and lead to an increased disease burden.Surveys have shown that estimated rates of pet owners have increased in the last decades in Germany.In 2019, there was at least 1 dog in approximately 19% and at least 1 cat in 23% of all German households. 1 Multiple studies describe a positive effect of pets, especially dogs, on mental health.Dunn et al 2 reported a higher life expectancy of patients with pets after cardiovascular events.A current review of the literature on mental health and pet ownership identified mixed influences overall, ranging from positive effects of pet ownership (n = 17), a mixed impact in 19 studies, and no impact in 13 studies, to negative effects on mental health in only 5 studies. 3 There are no data available about the influence of caring for a pet, especially a dog, on patients with inflammatory arthritis.We hypothesized that caring for a dog could improve QOL and lower depression and pain in patients with inflammatory rheumatic diseases because daily movement likely increases due to frequent dog walks. 4In a secondary analysis, we compared the scores of dog owners to cat owners and to patients without pets.One hundred fifty consecutive patients with RA, SpA, and PsA visiting our rheumatology outpatient clinic in Hannover, Germany, from October to December 2021 were included.Patients have given written informed consent for the data processing.This data analysis was approved by the Local Ethics Committee of Hannover Medical School (approval no.10311_BO_K_2022).Patients were introduced to the study using a leaflet, which was distributed to all patients with RA, PsA and SpA visiting the outpatient clinic.Individual questions regarding the study protocol and participation were discussed orally.There was no patient or public involvement in the study design.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".