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Perils of relationship stress

Chicago: A bad marriage might literally make you sick. Marital strife and other bad personal relationships can raise your risk for heart disease, researchers report.

What it possibly boils down to is stress, a known contributor to health problems, as well as a potential byproduct of troubled relationships.

In a study of 9,011 British civil servants, most of them married, those with the worst close relationships were 34 per cent more likely to have heart trouble during 12 years of follow-up than those with good relationships. That included partners, close relatives and friends.

The study, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, follows previous research that has linked health problems with being single and having few close relationships. In the new study, researchers focussed more on the quality of marriage and other close relationships.

“What we add here is that, ‘OK, being married is in general good, but be careful about the kind of person you have married.’ The quality of the relationship matters,” said lead author Roberto De Vogli, a researcher with University College in London.

Dr. De Vogli said his research team is doing tests to see if study participants with bad relationships have any biological evidence of stress that could contribute to heart disease.

Another recent study looked at quality of relationships but had different results. There was no association between marital woes in general and risks for heart disease or early death. But it did find, over a 10-year follow-up, that women who keep silent during marital arguments had an increased risk of dying compared with wives who expressed their feelings during fights.

What appeared to matter more for men was just being married; married men were less likely to die during the follow-up than single men. That study, of 4,000 men and women, was published online in July in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine.

In Dr. De Vogli’s study, men and women with bad relationships faced equal risks. Volunteers filled out questionnaires asking them to rate the person to whom they felt closest on several measures. These included questions about to what extent does that person “give you worries, problems and stress?”

They were asked about whether they felt they could confide in that person, or whether talking with that person made them feel worse.

Over the following 12 years, 589 participants had heart attacks or other heart problems. Those with the highest negative scores on the questionnaire had the highest risks. — AP

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