Dog.
(Image credit: iStock.)

Owning a dog may lower your risk of death, scientists declare in an incredibly validating study published Friday in the journal Scientific Reports. The benefits are "especially prominent" for people who live alone, wrote Mwenya Mubanga, a Ph.D. candidate at Uppsala University in Sweden and the lead author of the study.

The Swedish team behind the positive findings tracked 3.4 million people over a dozen years. "Adults who live alone and owned a dog were 33 percent less likely to die during the study," ABC News reported, compared to adults living by themselves who did not have a canine companion. The dog owners were also 36 percent less likely to succumb to cardiovascular disease.

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Kelly O'Meara Morales

Kelly O'Meara Morales is a staff writer at The Week. He graduated from Sarah Lawrence College and studied Middle Eastern history and nonfiction writing amongst other esoteric subjects. When not compulsively checking Twitter, he writes and records music, subsists on tacos, and watches basketball.