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A day care program and evaluation of animal-assisted therapy (AAT) for the elderly with senile dementia

Mizue Suzuki, RN, PHN, PhD

Kiyomi Yamamoto, RN, PHN

School of Medicine, Hamamatsu University, Hamamatsu, Shizuoka, Japan

Masahiro Kanda, DVM

Totomi Hospital, Japan

Yoshimi Matsui, RN

Emi Kojima, CP

Hirono Fukawa, RN

Tomomi Sugita, MD, PhD

Hajime Oshiro, MD, PhD

Shizuoka Prefectural Pet Owner's Guidance Center, Hamamatsu, Japan

We conducted a survey to clarify the evaluation methods of animal-assisted therapy (AAT) for the elderly with senile dementia in an adult day care center. AAT was implemented for a total of six biweekly sessions. The AAT group consisted of seven subjects and the control group numbered 20 subjects. In a comparison between Mini-Mental State Exam (MMSE) scores at baseline and those measured three months later, the average MMSE score before AAT (baseline) was 11.43 (± 9.00), and three months later it was 12.29(± 9.69). In the AAT group, the average score on Nishimura's Activities of Daily Living (N-ADL) at baseline was 28.43(± 14.00), and after ATT it was 29.57(± 14.47). In the AAT group, the average baseline score on behavioral pathology of Alzheimer's disease (Behave-AD) was 11.14(± 4.85), and three months after AAT it was 7.29(± 7.11) (p < 0.05). In the control group, the average baseline score was 5.45(± 3.27) and three months later it was 5.63(± 3.59). The evaluation of salivary CgA, as a mental stress index, showed a decreasing tendency in the AAT group. Our findings demonstrate the usefulness of using several methods for evaluation of the changes in patients given AAT.

Key Words: activities of daily living (ADL) • adult day care • Alzheimer's disease (AD) • animal-assisted therapy (AAT) • dementia of the Alzheimer's type (DAT) • Mini-Mental State Exam (MMSE) • Nishimura's ADL(N-ADL) • salivary chromogranin A (Cg A) • vascular dementia (VD)

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