Cat Ownership Not Linked To Mental Health Illness
In the past there were signs that having cats could link to some mental disorders like schizophrenia, but a new study has shown that there is no correlation to mental health illness if you own a cat.
It is not the cats that effects your health. It is the cat poop, but more specifically the parasites in the poop. This greatly effects children and pregnant women.
According to CBS and findings by University College London that have been published in Psychological Medicine, they started the study 5,000 people in the United Kingdom who were born between 1991 and 1992 and studied them until they were 18.
Before starting their study each person involved in the study would have to have households cats when their mothers were pregnant and when they were children growing up. They study involved that each person get evaluated for psychotic-like symptoms at ages 13 and 18 years.
“The message for cat owners is clear: there is no evidence that cats pose a risk to children’s mental health,” Francesca Solmi, the lead author of the study and a research associate in the Division of Psychiatry at University College London, said in a news release. “In our study, initial un-adjusted analyses suggested a small link between cat ownership and psychotic symptoms at age 13, but this turned out to be due to other factors.”
Nonetheless, cats don't cause people to become crazy.