Divorce in midlife hurts women's heart health
(Reuters)
Updated: 2006-09-07 14:22 NEW YORK - Divorce apparently
harms the cardiovascular health of women, but men's hearts appear to escape a
split-up unscathed, a new study shows.
The ill effects are largely due to the economic consequences, as well as the
emotional distress, of divorce for women, conclude Dr. Zhenmei Zhang of Bowling
Green State University in Ohio and Dr. Mark D. Hayward at the University of
Texas at Austin.
Zhang and Hayward also found that while divorce didn't appear to affect men's
cardiovascular health, divorced, widowed and remarried men were all more likely
to die sooner of non-heart-related causes than men who had stayed married to the
same person.
The health effects of marriage are well established. People who have ever
been married live longer than their never-married counterparts, and are less
likely to suffer from mental health problems such as depression and anxiety. Few
researchers, however, have looked beyond ever-married or never-married status to
study the effects of divorce on health.
To investigate, the researchers studied data on 9,434 men and women between
the ages of 51 and 61 in 1992 who were interviewed every two years up until
2000, and report the findings in the Journal of Marriage and Family.
Women who had been divorced, widowed or remarried were more likely to develop
heart disease during the course of the study than those who were married
continuously, the researchers found. They estimated that by age 60, assuming
none had died, 31 percent of remarried women, 33 percent of divorced women and
30 percent of widows would have heart disease, compared to 22 percent of women
still married to the same person.
No such difference was seen for men. In fact, men who remarried were actually
19 percent less likely to develop heart disease than those who had stayed
married to the same person.
Hayward and Zhang note that remarried women were more likely to have heart
disease than continuously married women, although their financial circumstances
were not substantially worse. More study is needed to understand why, they
conclude.
SOURCE: Journal of Marriage and Family, August 2006.
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