Canine companionship, with a catch: Health effects of big-city dog ownership differ by location

How neighborhoods support healthy aging is a key question for aging societies. Yet little is known about how dog walking, an everyday activity, interacts with the neighborhood environment in dense Asian cities. In a cross-sectional study of 1,000 adults aged 60 and over living in Osaka, Japan, an Osaka Metropolitan University research team measured physical activity, mental well-being, and loneliness. They examined whether the links between dog ownership and these outcomes differed by household composition and by neighborhood features measured with geographic information system (GIS) data: intersection density (an indicator of how walkable the street network is), green-space ratio, and population density.

Dog owners were more likely than non-owners to meet physical-activity guidelines, but only if they walked regularly; owners who did not walk showed no such advantage. When the researchers compared four groups by dog ownership and walking habit, the advantage followed walking rather than owning a dog. Non-owners were more active in neighborhoods with more intersections, whereas dog owners stayed active even in less walkable areas, suggesting that dog walking may make up for a less walkable environment. Neighborhoods with denser street networks (more intersections) were linked to better well-being among non-owners only, and among older adults living alone, dog owners reported lower loneliness than non-owners. Dog walking thus exerts effects that depend on place, offering hypotheses for age-friendly neighborhood planning in high-density Asian cities.

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