This study has gone a bit viral because apparently puppies are going to save our lives
Sadly, that's pretty unlikely to be true 

https://twitter.com/CNN/status/1181558654044119041 …
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Here, we have a piece of research that didn't control for any factors other than dog ownership ~at all~ It's not hard to see how this might make the results a bit problematicpic.twitter.com/9ZY2Jp6csH
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Essentially, it means that this study just looked at a simple association Dog owners die a bit less than non-owners That's it!
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Dog owners are often very different to non-owners in important ways From the Swedish study I mentioned above, owners were more educated, married more often, more likely to have kids, etcpic.twitter.com/LmYkqrlFuE
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What this means is that there are literally hundreds of explanations for dog owners being more healthy than non-owners that have nothing to do with the dogs Funnily enough, that's something that the authors noted in the studypic.twitter.com/BWzTi99vJs
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Basically, healthy people might be more likely to buy dogs Thus, dog owners die less Association rather than causation
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And the mechanisms of dogs saving our lives are a bit flimsy. Some minor reductions in blood pressure =/= lifesaving
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So...puppies probably aren't saving our lives They're still great tho, you should definitely get one Adopt, don't shop!pic.twitter.com/n0a6UOHvZf
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End of conversation
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