Tag: poor marriages and health

When you live with a serious illness – and a bad marriage

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 55 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥ @HeartSisters

I can’t quite get over a University of Rochester study that predicted 83% of happily married women will still be alive 15 years after cardiac bypass surgery, versus only 28% of women in unhappy marriages.(1)  Researchers suggest that supportive spouses may help by encouraging healthy behaviour, like increasing exercise, healthy eating or quitting smoking – critical to longterm survival from heart disease, as well as providing a powerful reason for women to “stick around so they can stay in the relationship that they like.”  Researchers also cited earlier studies showing that people with lower hostility in their marriages have less of the kind of chronic inflammation that is linked to heart disease.

What about unhappily married women? Just being married is not in itself a guarantee that women will be supported by their spouses during recuperation from chronic illness. The prognosis, for women particularly, seems directly linked to marriage quality. What, for example, do you think the future holds for the cardiac health of the women who shared the following stories of their marriages?* Continue reading “When you live with a serious illness – and a bad marriage” →

When being married makes being sick worse

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 32 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥ @HeartSisters

Research suggests that being happily married can have a big effect on helping us recover from serious health crises like a heart attack. For men, in fact, marriage doesn’t even have to be particularly happy to increase positive health outcomes. Just the mere state of being married, happily or miserably, apparently leads to better outcomes in males.

But not so for women. A study from the University of Utah, for example, tells us that after 15 years of follow-up, researchers found that 83% of happily wedded wives were still alive after their cardiac bypass surgery, versus only 28% of women in unhappy marriages.  They also found that women who report high levels of marital strain also report depression, high blood pressure, high LDL (bad) cholesterol, obesity and other signs of metabolic syndrome – a cluster of known risk factors for cardiovascular disease. And in 2006, the American Journal of Cardiology published a study that found patients with both severe heart disease and poor marriages had a four times higher risk of dying over a four-year period.

So consider for example, how the day-to-day reality described by these heart patients might affect their prognoses:     Continue reading “When being married makes being sick worse” →