Pet Ownership

Research summary

• Pet ownership's link to cardiovascular health and mortality is real but notably inconsistent across species and studies.
• A meta-analysis of 26 studies found pet owners had a 19% lower cardiovascular mortality risk after adjustment (hazard ratio 0.81), and pet owners also had lower resting heart rate and blood pressure — but the same meta-analysis found the adjusted hazard ratio for overall mortality was not reliably significant (0.40, 95% CI 0.04-3.78), and dog ownership specifically was not significantly associated with survival on its own.
• A separate, larger meta-analysis focused specifically on dogs (10 studies, 3.8 million participants) reached a different conclusion: dog ownership was associated with a 24% lower all-cause mortality risk and 31% lower cardiovascular mortality, with an even larger 65% reduction among people with a prior coronary event.
• Cat ownership has its own literature: a national US cohort found cat owners had a lower risk of dying from a heart attack (relative risk 0.63), and a separate cohort found cat ownership — but not dog ownership — was linked to lower cardiovascular and stroke death in women.
• Not every finding points the same direction: a large European cohort of 23,274 older adults found no overall mortality benefit from any pet, and found bird ownership was actually associated with 23-40% higher mortality risk in women.
• Taken together, the literature suggests a real but genuinely species- and study-dependent association, all of it observational — healthier, more social, or more affluent people may simply be more likely to keep pets in the first place.