ArticlePloS one2021
Dog Owners' Survey reveals Medical Alert Dogs can alert to multiple conditions and multiple people.
Article in PloS one, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed, 14 citations in OpenAlex.
- Dogs' Detection of Symptomatic and Asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 by Non-Working Dogs: Feasibility and Limits Under Controlled Laboratory Conditions.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2026Article
- What Is the Role of Diabetic Alert Dogs in Glycemic Monitoring for Individuals with Type 1 Diabetes? A Scoping Review.Medical sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Attitudes Toward In-Training Assistance Dogs in University Classrooms.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Article
- Human-dog trust and cohesion within French military canine teams.Military psychology : the official journal of the Division of Military Psychology, American Psychological Association · 2025Article
- Scent Detection Threshold of Trained Dogs toAnimals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Article
- Rethinking love, independence, and speciesism in assistance dog discourse.Frontiers in sociology · 2024Review
- Dogs can discriminate between human baseline and psychological stress condition odours.PloS one · 2022Article
- Pet primates for sale in the United States.PloS one · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Medical 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. The overall aims of this study were to record the proportion of MAD owners who have a dog that alerts to multiple health conditions or to people other than the target person and to determine whether any sociodemographic variables were associated with dogs alerting to multiple conditions, multiple people, or both. MAD owners completed an online survey that contained a series of forced choice questions. Sixty-one participants reported a total of 33 different conditions to which dogs alerted. Eighty-four percent of participants reported that their dog alerted to multiple conditions and 54% reported that their dog alerted to multiple people. This is the first study to document that a large percentage of people report that their MAD alerts to multiple conditions and/or to multiple people. We present a discussion of how these alerting abilities could develop, but questions about the underlying mechanisms remain.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.