Your Cat Also Prevents Heart Attacks

All those who have a furry feline at home now have one more reason to rejoice. A study conducted by the University of Minnesota’s Stroke Research Center has found that people who had previously or currently owned cats were less likely to die from heart attack and other cardiovascular disease.

The details of the study were presented on Thursday at the American Stroke Association meeting.

The decade-long study examined data from 4,435 people who took part in the U.S. government's second National Health and Nutrition Examination Study. All people were aged between 30 to 75 years at the start of the study and did not have any symptoms of coronary disease.

The study took into account risk factors for heart disease like age, gender, ethnicity/race, systolic blood pressure, cigarette smoking, diabetes mellitus, cholesterol levels and body mass index.

The researchers led by Dr Adnan Qureshi found that over a 20-year period, participants who had never owned a cat were 40 percent more likely to die from heart attack and 30 percent more likely to die from any kind of cardiovascular disease.

Qureshi said, "We certainly expected an effect, because we thought that there was a biologically plausible mechanism at work. But the magnitude of the effect was hard to predict."

The researchers are not sure regarding the exact reasons behind the health benefit, but Qureshi believes it may be related to the stress reducing effect a cat has on its owner. He admits, however, that the personality type of a cat owner may be the major contributing factor.

Qureshi said, “Maybe cat owners tend not to have high-stress personalities, or they are just the type of people that are not highly affected by anxiety or high-stress situations.”

Qureshi also stressed that dog lovers shouldn't feel left out. Dogs would probably bring people the same kind of benefit, he said, but the numbers of dog owners in the study wasn't big enough to count statistically.