Adequate medications can for some time postpone this process. Depression and cognitive decline especially result in patient’s mortality among the elderly people with dementia. At present, dementia symptoms cannot be cured and inevitably lead to patient’s disability and eventually, to his/her death. But, for example, frontotemporal dementia occurs as early as at the age of 45. Dementia usually starts to affect people at the age of 60+ years. The other most frequent types of dementia are vascular dementia, dementia with Lewy bodies, Parkinson’s disease dementia, frontotemporal dementia/ degeneration, and mixed dementia.
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) seems to be the most common form of dementia and contributes to 70% of dementia cases. ĭementia results from different diseases, for example, strokes, malnutrition, or brain tumors. The cognitive impairment is usually accompanied with other symptoms such as behavioral disorders, difficulties in walking, sleeping, or sexual problems.
Dementia is a neurodegenerative syndrome, which causes deterioration of cognitive functions, especially thinking, orientation, memory, or communication. It is estimated that every year there occur about 10 million new cases. Nowadays, the number of people suffering from dementia worldwide, particularly Alzheimer’s disease, reaches about 50 million. More research in the area of methodology for the implementation of AAT is necessary, and more research should be conducted with respect to the use of AAT for the improvement of cognitive functions in people with dementia. The findings of this review, based on significant effect sizes, reveal that AAT may work as a beneficial and effective complementary treatment, especially in the area of behavioral and psychological symptoms, for patients with different degree of dementia severity if AAT is targeted at their specific needs and interests. Eventually, only six studies were involved into the final analysis. The search was conducted for the studies dating from 2016 till 31 August 2018 because several review studies were published before. The key method of this review study is a systematic review of the research studies detected in the Web of Science, Scopus and PubMed.
Therefore, the aim of this study is to explore the effectiveness of animal assisted therapy (AAT) with special focus on canis therapy among people with dementia, specifically Alzheimer’s disease. Dementia represents a mental and economic burden for both patients and their caregivers.
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