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HowToPreventHeartDisease.com |
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Marriage Might Help Women Prevent Heart Disease! Heart disease is the leading cause of death for both men and women. In 2006, half of the deaths due to heart disease were women. Almost two-third of the women who die suddenly of coronary heart disease have no previous symptoms. In general, 90 percent of heart disease patients have at least one risk factor, which includes high cholesterol, high blood pressure, diabetes, cigarette smoking, overweight and obesity, unhealthy diet, lack of physical activity and excessive alcohol use. It is believed that if people could control their risk factors appropriately, heart disease can be prevented. On August 18, 2012, researchers from Princeton University presented a paper at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association indicated that continuous marriage without divorce or widowhood could develop fewer cardiovascular risk factors such as high blood pressure for women. However, the same argument did not hold for men. Men who married younger were more likely to have warning signs for chronic inflammation later in life. While inflammation is a crucial part of healing process, chronic inflammation can be harmful in itself.
Most previous research has found that marriage improved health for men but did little for women. This could partly due to the fact that women tend to be more health-conscious than men, visit doctor more frequently and take on the role of reminding their husbands to get medical care. Meanwhile, most marriage and health studies have relied on self-reports of health that can be unreliable or general records of mortality that reveal little about why marriage, health and death might be associated. Instead, the researchers focused on biological risk factors or signs that someone might be facing health problems. They used data from the National Social Health and Aging Project and traced the marital histories and health risk factors of 528 women and 534 men who aged between 57 and 75. Cardiovascular risk factors like blood pressure, resting heart rate and waist circumference and metabolic risk factors were examined. A measurement of C-reactive protein, which is found in the blood and indicates inflammation, was also included in the analysis. It was found that the longer the marriage for women, the fewer cardiovascular risk factors. The effect was significant but modest: every 10 years of continuous marriage was associated with a 13 percent decrease in cardiovascular risk. Once marriage is disrupted, it could jeopardize the health. Women who were continuously married had a 40 percent lower chance of getting metabolic risk factors than those who experienced 2 episodes of divorce or widowhood. This was in line with earlier studies on divorce that linked breaking up to bad health. In 2009, a study found 20 percent more chronic health problems in divorced people than the currently married. But surprisingly, the current study did not find any protective effect of marriage in men, which somewhat disagreed with previous studies. According to the findings, very early marriage might not good for men. A 5-year increase in age at first marriage lowered the risk of chronic inflammation by 30 percent. As the study was on older adults and men have been known to have shorter life expectancy than women, it is possible that the least healthy men in the group had already died and so were not included in the study. This could, as explained by the researchers, skew the results. Researchers pointed out that the biological look at the sociology of marriage is still in its early stages and there are many complicating factors to examine. While other health experts generally agreed that the study did a really interesting job of showing the nuances of risk among men and women across age, they encouraged more research to be carried out into biology of social relationships.
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