It's often said of a failing relationship that "no one ever died of a broken heart," but researchers now say it can and does happen.
A recently published study of older married couples found that people in bad or unhappy marriages, especially the wives, display an elevated risk for heart disease than people whose marriages are sound and happy.
The study led by a Michigan State University sociologist analyzed 5 years of data on more than 1,000 married men and women participating in the National Social Life, Health and Aging Project.
The study participants, ranging in age from 57 to 85, responded to surveys concerning the character of their marriage while researchers looked at results of lab tests and analyzed information concerning the heart health of the participants, including strokes, heart attacks and high blood pressure.
The results strongly suggest a marriage that's going badly results in more harm to the heart than a good one offers positive benefits in cardiovascular health, says Michigan State's Hui Liu and her co-researcher Linda Waite, a sociologist at the University of Chicago.
And the impact of a bad marriage on heart health appears to increase with age, possible due to the decline in immune system function and increasing physical frailty that come with advanced age, the researchers suggest.
The findings suggest marriage counseling and programs intended to help sustain marital well being and quality should be aimed at couples of all ages, Liu says.
"Marriage counseling is focused largely on younger couples," she says. "But these results show that marital quality is just as important at older ages, even when the couple has been married 40 or 50 years."
The stronger effect of poor marital quality on women as compared to men may be because women are more likely to internalize negative emotions and feelings and become depressed, again increasing the risk of developing cardiovascular problems, Liu says.
Such heart problems can lead to a further decline in marital quality for women but not for men, a finding consistent with longstanding observations showing wives as more likely to provide care and support for ailing husbands, while husbands are less likely to provide the same for ill wives.
"In this way, a wife's poor health may affect how she assesses her marital quality, but a husband's poor health doesn't hurt his view of marriage," Liu says.
The study by Liu and Waite was funded by the National Institute of Aging, part of the National Institutes of Health.
