For advertising information visit www.samplerpublications.com or call 859.225.4466 | February 2015
Health and Marriage
By Angela S. Hoover, Staff Writer
For better or worse, in sickness and
health, marriage itself can affect health.
Happy marriages can promote good
health and unhappy marriages can
move up the date of ‘til death do us
part’ numerous studies suggest.
For the happily involved individuals, marriage or a serious romantic
partnership can improve overall health
as well as good health outcomes for
diseases and conditions. A 2013 study
published in the Journal of Clinical
Oncology suggested that married individuals who are diagnosed with cancer
are likely to live longer than cancer
patients who are unmarried at the time
of diagnosis.
Additionally, a happy romantic
partnership may reduce the risk of
cardiovascular disease, per a 2014
study published in Medical News
Today. Another study from NYU
Langone Medical Center in New York
linked marriage to a reduced risk of
cardiovascular disease (CVD). The
Framingham Offspring study followed
more than 3,500 adults over a decade
and found that even when considering
existing health factors, married men
were 46 percent less likely to die than
unmarried men.
The unhappily coupled, however,
have more grim health outlooks when
they stay in unhappy relationships.
Researchers at the University of
Pittsburgh analyzed 281 healthy,
employed, middle-aged adults who
were either married or living with a
partner in a marital-like relationship.
Over four days interactions between
participants and their partners were
monitored every hour and participants rated their interaction as either
positive or negative. The thickness of
the subjects’ carotid arteries – major
blood vessels in the neck that supply
the head and neck with oxygenated
blood – were measured. Thickening
of the carotid arteries can cause them
to narrow, which can lead to atherosclerosis, a build-up of fatty plaques in
the arteries that increases the risk of
CVD. The results of the study, published in the journal Psychosomatic
Medicine, revealed that participants
who reported negative interactions
with their partner had thicker carotid
arteries. They calculated that these
subjects had an 8.5 percent higher
risk of developing CVD as compared to those who reported positive
interactions with their partner. The
findings were consistent across all
age groups, races, genders and education levels. Furthermore, the results
remained even after accounting for
other factors that can influence CVD
risk. According to Kamarck: “The
contribution of this study is in showing that these sorts of links (between
marital interactions and CVD) may
be observed even during the earliest
stages of plaque development, and that
these observations may be rooted not
just in the way that we evaluate our
relationships in general but in the quality of special social interactions with
our partners as they unfold during our
daily lives.”
Another study published in the
Journal of Health and Social Behavior
looked at data from around 1,200
married people between the ages of
57 and 85 over a period of five years.
Participants reported their cardiovascular health and their overall marriage
quality, such as how demanding or
critical a spouse is. The study found
that the negative effects of a low-quality marriage became stronger with age.
Women were more likely than men to
have heart problems, possibly because
women tend to internalize their negative feelings, per the researchers. They
&
39
further theorized that the stress from
marital problems or dissatisfaction in
the relationship could have a stronger
effect as our immune system weakens
with age. Lead researcher Hui Liu says
it takes time to build up but your body
remembers the effect. This is why the
negative effects are stronger for older
people, he believes.
It’s not just cancer or CVD that a
marriage can affect: Arguing with your
partner could be packing on pounds
of fat, per new research that suggests
hostile relationships could affect fat
metabolism, especially if depression is
involved.
For the study, 43 healthy couples
who were married for at least three
years