Type 2 diabetes risk may be higher for owners of dogs with diabetes
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
Adults owning a dog with diabetes are more likely to develop type 2 diabetes than an owner of a dog without diabetes, according to a study published in BMJ.
“Diabetes in the dog might be a sentinel for shared diabetogenic health behaviors or other environmental exposures influencing everyone [in] the household. We, in contrast, could detect no shared diabetes risk for cat owners and their pets,” Beatrice Kennedy, MD, PhD, a postdoctoral research fellow in medical epidemiology at Uppsala University, Sweden, and a clinical resident in endocrinology and diabetes at Uppsala University Hospital, told Healio.
Kennedy and colleagues conducted a cohort, register-based study of dog and cat owners from Sweden enrolled with Agria Pet Insurance. Also included in the study population were spouses or partners living with a dog or cat owner based on information from Sweden’s Total Population Register.
Owners were considered to have type 2 diabetes if there was a main or secondary diagnoses recorded in the National Patient Register or if they had a prescription for an oral or noninsulin injectable diabetes drug in the Swedish Prescribed Drug Register. Type 1 diabetes was not included in the study. Pets were considered to have a diabetes based on diagnoses from veterinary reports.
The owner-dog study population included 208,980 pairs, of which 94.6% did not have diabetes at the start of follow-up. During a maximum 6 years of follow-up, there were 7.7 cases of type 2 diabetes in dog owners per 1,000 person-years at risk and 1.3 cases of diabetes in dogs per 1,000 dog years at risk. After adjusting for covariates, owning a dog with diabetes was associated with an increased risk for developing type 2 diabetes (adjusted HR = 1.32; 95% CI, 1.04-1.68). In an unadjusted model, dogs had a higher risk for developing diabetes with an owner with type 2 diabetes compared with dogs who did not have an owner with type 2 diabetes (HR = 1.28; 95% CI, 1.01-1.63). However, the risk was attenuated in a model adjusted for covariates.
The owner-cat study population included 123,566 pairs, of which 95% did not have diabetes at the start of the follow-up. During a maximum 6 years of follow-up, there were 7.9 cases of type 2 diabetes in cat owners per 1,000 person-years at risk and 2.2 cases of diabetes in cats per 1,000 cat years at risk.
Owning a cat with diabetes was not associated with an increased risk for type 2 diabetes in both unadjusted and fully adjusted models. Cats also did not have an increased risk for developing diabetes if they had an owner with type 2 diabetes.
“Those knowledgeable about feline diabetes might be surprised that we did not see a shared risk of diabetes in cat owners and their pets, as the cat diabetes phenotype is usually considered more similar to type 2 diabetes than that of canine diabetes,” Kennedy said.
Kennedy said socioeconomic status and other demographic variables did not explain the increased risk for type 2 diabetes in owners of dogs with diabetes. Future research in another country and looking at lifestyle factors could provide more clarity.
“It would be very interesting to replicate the study in, for example, the U.K. or the U.S., to investigate if we could discern the same shared diabetes risk in another country with dissimilar regulations and practices for pet ownership,” Kennedy said. “It would also be of great interest to delve deeper into the potential underlying mechanisms such as shared physical activity patterns between dog owners and their dogs. Maybe a project in which we put accelerometers on both owners and their dogs.”
For more information:
Beatrice Kennedy, MD, PhD, can be reached at beatrice.kennedy@medsci.uu.se.
Collapse
Read more about
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts