Therapy Dogs Could Help Dental Access & Reduce Missed Appointments
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- Published: Friday, 14 April 2023 08:06
- Written by Peter Ingle
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In contrast to the UK’s problems with availability of dental care, where more dental professionals are needed, a recent study in America has looked to enlisting dogs to help improve access.
Lexi Dunnells, a DDS student at the University of Colorado’s Anschutz campus wanted to investigate ways to reduce barriers to dental care. In her previous career teaching for five years, Lexi was shocked to find that the number one reason children were missing school was dental pain. Her mother is a retired speech pathologist and, in her retirement has taken to dog training. Dunnells said, “She trained Ziggy to be a certified therapy dog.”
There was very little material in the literature about using therapy dogs in dentistry. This left Dunnells wondering whether therapy dogs could ease dental anxiety and increase access to dental care.
Ziggy, a black German shepherd, was flown in from Arizona, joining forces with Dunnells on the research study to monitor stress and anxiety indicators in the student dental clinic for 20 military veteran patients. “For the patients who had Ziggy present during their appointment, he was there the entire time, sitting right next to them,” Dunnells said. “Just naturally, all the patients sat with their hand on Ziggy’s head, which was really sweet.”
The study used a group of 20 patients, 10 that would be seen with Ziggy and 10 without. Blood pressure and pulse were measured at the start of the appointments, and then throughout the appointment the pulse was repeated every five minutes. At the end of the appointment blood pressure and pulse were recorded once more. The appointments included hygiene, some check-ups, and fillings, as well as denture stages.
There was a statistically significant decrease in pulse for the group that had Ziggy present from the beginning of the appointment to their pulse reading at the end of the appointment. While pulses will generally drop over the course of an appointment, these were larger than would usually be expected.
Comparing the two groups, a lower than average pulse and a lower systolic blood pressure were seen when Ziggy was present. The difference was not statistically significant, mostly because of sample size.
It was also observed that throughout the appointments, including during the injection of local anaesthesia, pulse readings remained steady when the dog was there and did not when the dog was not there.
This is a project that will not end with its presentation at the School of Dental Medicine Research Day. As Dunnells said, “My main goal going into this was to then be able to have my results to present to our administration to say: “This is something worth doing.” Especially because so many therapy dogs are on a volunteer basis, so it costs us no money to do this. When I initially presented the study to our dean, she was super receptive to it and excited.”
“I graduate in a year, so I was thinking I would never even see the result of this, and I just found out that the School of Dental Medicine will be bringing in therapy dogs to the student clinics starting this June, which is really awesome.”
She has also spoken to the director of the endodontics department who is interested in seeing if therapy dogs might reduce the high number of missed appointments. This would allow further study with the dogs during a specific procedure as well as one that has a reputation for causing anxiety.
Perhaps there is a future role for the UDA in dentistry, that is, utilising dog assistance.
Canine guidance could take on a whole new meaning in dentistry.
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