Sure thing.
This study was launched in 2015 in collaboration with the Canadian Institute for Military and Veteran Health Research. It was led by Université Laval. The purpose of the study, as was mentioned, was to investigate the potential effectiveness of psychiatric service dogs for veterans, specifically those suffering from PTSD. It was a pilot study. It was not a large group. There were 18 veterans with PTSD who completed the 18-month study. There were 31 veterans who started the study, but only 18 kept their dog for the entire duration of the study and continued to report their results.
At the end of the day, they reported fewer nightmares, improved sleep quality, and a reduction in PTSD symptoms and depressive symptoms. Some reported an overall improvement in quality of life. There was an increase in social integration in the community as well. The one observation that was taken that didn't show a measurable improvement was a decrease in dependence on caregivers. That's another aspect that is being measured now in a separate study in Australia. That's ongoing. It's to see if they can separately measure dependence on caregivers in a more robust way.
The small nature of the study and the collection of schools in Canada that were used made the findings fairly limited in their use. There were seven schools in the study. In terms of some of the challenges they encountered, first of all, there was no consensus among the schools about which breeds of dogs to train and where the sources of dogs should come from. Most of them in our study were donations or animal rescues. There was a strong variation in the duration of the training, from hundreds of hours to thousands of hours. Even the tasks that were trained were quite different from school to school. Some schools put a bigger emphasis on each unique veteran's needs. Some put more training into the dogs themselves before pairing, and then very little afterwards. For others it was the opposite.
It's important to note that there's a lot of variation, too, in the placement and the environment in which the dogs are placed. From patient to patient, there's a difference in community dwelling, their social relationships, the other treatments and medications they're taking, their personal interest in activities and also their having another pet. All of those things made it difficult to make broad generalizations from the limited findings of this study.