Chronic pain often leads practitioners to prescribe opioids, though prescribed opioids have created a nationwide crisis that reportedly killed more than 107,000 Americans from December 2020 through December 2021. Therefore, an urgent need exists to develop novel non-opioid and non-addicting therapies for managing chronic pain. To help develop these therapies, the National Institutes of Health recently awarded a five-year grant to Mahmoud Salama Ahmed, Ph.D., from the TTUHSC Jerry H. Hodge School of Pharmacy. 

Many people view their dog as a family member, friend, or kid, but does the relationship with them really resemble these human relationships? Researchers from ELTE Eötvös Loránd University now set out to explore the precise role dogs play in human social networks by comparing human-dog relationships with human-human relationships using 13 relationship scales. Their study revealed that the owner-dog relationship can be interpreted as a mix of child and best friend relationships, combining positive aspects of the child relationship with the lack of negative aspects of friendship, blended with a high level of control over the dog.  Interestingly, while owners often rate their relationship with their dog as superior to any human bond, the study also found that more support in human relationships correlates with more support in dog-owner bonds, suggesting that dogs complement human relationships rather than compensate for their deficiencies.