Introduction: Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is an impairing mental health condition with high prevalence among military and general populations alike. PTSD service dogs are a complementary and alternative intervention needing scientific validation. We investigated whether dogs can detect putative stress-related volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the breath of people with trauma histories (54% with PTSD) exposed to personalized trauma cues.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGender plays a significant role in an individual's experiences and behaviors, as well as their expectations of others. Researchers have long operationalized gender using limited, mutually exclusive categories that fail to capture the rich variability within a gender-diverse population. While open-ended responses or multi-item scales may be a socially progressive approach and necessary for some gender-based research (e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMedical Alert Dogs (MADs) are a promising support system for a variety of medical conditions. Emerging anecdotal reports suggest that dogs may alert to additional health conditions and different people other than those that they were trained for or initially began alerting. As the use of medical alert dogs increases, it is imperative that such claims are documented empirically.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: There is a growing market for diabetes-alert dogs but little has been published regarding their ability to reliably detect hypoglycemia. We aimed to determine whether 2 dogs could detect hypoglycemic breath samples from people with type 1 diabetes (T1D) and then transfer detection to novel hypoglycemic breath samples.
Methods: Breath samples were collected from individuals with T1D during times of normo-, hypo- and hyperglycemia.