Society & Culture - Posted by Futurity-Jenny Leonard on Wednesday, August 12, 2009 4:00 - 1 Comment 
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...To stay healthy, stay married
A new study finds that that people who are divorced or widowed have 20 percent more chronic health conditions, including heart disease, diabetes, and cancer, than married people.
A new study finds that that people who are divorced or widowed have 20 percent more chronic health conditions, including heart disease, diabetes, and cancer, than married people.
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The text of this article by Futurity is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives License.
U. CHICAGO (US)—The end of a marriage, whether through divorce or death, has a lingering impact on health, even if a person remarries, a new study finds.
“Among the currently married, those who have ever been divorced show worse health on all dimensions,” says study coauthor Linda Waite, the Lucy Flower professor in sociology and director of the Center on Aging at the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. “Both the divorced and widowed who do not remarry show worse health on all dimensions.”
Waite conducted the study with Mary Elizabeth Hughes, assistant professor at Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health. Although a number of studies have looked at the connection between health and marriage, their study is the first to examine both marital transitions and marital status on a wide range of health dimensions. The findings will be published in the September issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior.
Research has shown that people enter adulthood with a particular “stock” of health. “Each person’s experience of marital gain and loss affect this stock of health,” Waite says. “For example, the transition to marriage tends to bring an immediate health benefit, in that it improves health behaviors for men and financial well-being for women.”
In contrast, divorce or widowhood undermines health because incomes drop and stress develops over issues such as shared child care.
The study found that people who are divorced or widowed have 20 percent more chronic health conditions, including heart disease, diabetes, and cancer than married people and 23 percent more mobility limitations, like climbing stairs or walking around the block.
People who remarried have 12 percent more chronic conditions and 19 percent more mobility limitations, but no more depressive symptoms than those who are continuously married.
The effects of marriage, divorce, and remarriage on health are based on the ways in which various illnesses develop and heal, Waite says.
“Some health situations, like depression, seem to respond both quickly and strongly to changes in current conditions,” she explains. “In contrast, conditions such as diabetes and heart disease develop slowly over a substantial period and show the impact of past experiences, which is why health is undermined by divorce or widowhood, even when a person remarries.”
The research was supported with a grant from the National Institute on Aging.
University of Chicago news: www-news.uchicago.edu
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1 Comment
Adair
And the title (and some of the article) here aren’t inflammatory at all.
“In contrast, divorce or widowhood undermines health because incomes drop and stress develops over issues such as shared child care.”
And I wouldn’t expect someone to develop poor health while staying in a marriage they desperately want out of.
Why not, “To stay healthy, don’t get married so you don’t get divorced?” “To stay healthy, become financially independent of any romantic partner.” “To stay healthy, don’t have kids so you can’t fight over them or have trouble taking care of them?”
“’For example, the transition to marriage tends to bring an immediate health benefit, in that it improves health behaviors for men and financial well-being for women.’” And it doesn’t increase financial well-being for many men as well, in this day and age? Does it not tend to increase health behaviors or some other positive attribute in women as well?
I am assuming that the title was meant to be tongue-in-cheek and the quote above is, well, standard short-hand for expressing statistical differences in gender, even though some of us find it regrettable.
But it also could be scare-mongering, moralistic, and generally irresponsible. For instance, the relative but not the absolute risks are reported, and it certainly looks a lot scarier to be told you’ll have a 20% higher chance of a disease than to be shown the actual percent chance you’ll get the disease. The moralistic dimension enters in the lack of discussion of the outcome of never marrying–although it may be a limitation of the study, the presentation here emphasizes a greater value on being married (and in a life long marriage! true love and soul mates!) for everyone. Considering that the risk of becoming divorced after marriage is high, I find it irresponsible to increase the already inflated cultural value on getting married.
Additionally, are the risk figures controlled for such things as (a) People in worse health and/or with more bad-health-causing stress may be more likely to get divorced, and (b) time since divorce and other compounding factors (like total length of marriage, age, etc) when comparing remarried and not remarried divorced subjects?