Divorce and widowhood cause more than bitterness and broken hearts. They have a lingering, long-term detrimental impact on health even if the person finds a new partner, a study released this week suggests.
Researchers at the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, conducted a study involving 8,652 people aged 51 to 61 and found that divorced people have 20 per cent more chronic illnesses such as cancer than married people.
The study also reveals that finding another partner does not nurse them back to health. Those who have remarried still have 12 per cent more chronic conditions and 19 per cent more mobility problems than those who have been continuously married, the researchers write in the Journal of Health and Social Behaviour.
It shows that while the health benefits of marriage – which are believed to stem from financial security and the positive impact of wives on their husbands' diets and lifestyles – are well known, they are significantly reduced the second and third times around.
Professor Linda Waite, a sociologist at the University of Chicago and co-author of the research, said the loss of a spouse or divorce can cause enormous stress for months or years which damages the circulatory system. She said:
‘Stress affects your immune system and leads to increased inflammation. We're now thinking that inflammation is at the route of cardiovascular disease and certain kinds of cancer.
‘In addition, during that time you're not taking care of yourself. You're eating poorly, you're not exercising. You're sleeping terribly. Then your social world, of course, especially in the case of divorce, suffers. You lose half your friends and your in-laws.
‘Losing a marriage through divorce or widowhood is extremely stressful and that a high-stress period takes a toll on health. Think of health as money in the bank. Think of a marriage as a mechanism for ‘saving’ or adding to health. Think of divorce as a period of very high expenditures.'
She said that that divorce can be so traumatic that even tying the knot again is not enough to reverse the physical and mental toll. ‘If you think of it like money, you took a hit and got some damage,’ she added. ‘You move from a state where you're getting damaged to where you're taking care of yourself but you still have that damage.’
The research, called Marital Biography and Health Midlife, will be published fully in September 2009 issue of Journal of Health and Social Behaviour.
Mark Hayward, director of the Population Research Center and Fellow Professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, said spouses check up on each other's needs. They remind each other about when to go see a doctor, a dentist or when to get a medical issue checked out.
‘You're making decisions together about your lifestyle and investing in a future together,’ he said.
Professor Hayward was not involved in the latest research, but found in a similar study in 2006 that divorce has a lasting impact on cardiovascular diseases, even after remarriage. The study, funded by the National Institute on Aging, found that divorced middle-aged women were 60 percent more likely to have cardiovascular disease than middle-aged women who remain married.
‘There's no erasure of the effects of divorce,’ he said. ‘There is intense stress leading up to divorce, stresses during divorce proceedings. Think of divorce as one of the most intense stressors. It leads to what we call dysregulation [impairment] in key cardiovascular process that may be permanently altered. You're not going back to your original set point.’
(See the CNN News report)
Significant amount of recent studies indicate that marriage improves people's quality of life in a variety of ways. Single people are more likely to drink to excess and die of smoking-related illnesses, and tend to work longer hours and miss meals because they have no partner to make time for.
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