| Happily Ever After, For Longer |
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Love, sex, friendship, family, support, commitment are just a few of the words and images that might come to mind for most of us when thinking about marriage. Well, here’s a new one to add to the list . . . Health! Healthy Marriage, Healthy LifeAsk any couple wed for any length of time the reasons they got married, and it is almost certain few will identify “improved health and well-being” as one of their motivations. With more and more research showing the link between a healthy marriage and health in general, however, this correlation cannot be denied. Improved healing time, reduced blood pressure and risk from heart disease, reduced stress and cortisol levels, improved quality of life and better survival rates are all associated with healthy marriage. Still not convinced? Healthy Marriage and Aging WellDr. George Vaillant, a psychiatrist and professor at Harvard Medical School, who also happens to be the director of the university’s longtime study of human development, has some very simple advice about extending one’s life; the first involves taking good vacations and the second is to take good care of your marriage. Perhaps more of us should read Dr. Vaillant’s 2002 book, Aging Well, in which he provides this shocking statistic, “A good marriage at age 50 predicted positive aging at 80. But, surprisingly, low cholesterol levels did not.” Richard Griffin, in the Cambridge Chronicle, sums up why so many today might struggle with the seemingly simplistic pieces of advice offered by Dr. Vaillant: “Powerful cultural forces in American life have enshrined unrelenting work as the supreme value.” “Marriage affects health, being married, staying married, being part of a married couple changes people’s choices. It changes their behaviors and that changes people’s outcomes – particularly their health outcomes,” says NIH (National Institutes of Health) grantee Dr. Linda Waite. She cites several NIH studies as the basis for her lecture, “Impact of Social Institutions on Health: The Case for Marriage.” She adds that, unlike many other social unions, marriage is recognized and supported by the community and is also a legally binding contract. The support — emotional, instrumental and financial, all play a large part in reducing stress in marriages, increasing overall health, well-being and longevity. Wound Healing“A happy marriage can help mend physical wounds,” according to Janice Kiecolt-Glaser Ph.D., Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at Ohio State University College of Medicine. Fortytwo couples took part in the study in which minor blister wounds were inflicted, and then monitored under two different scenarios, one positive and one negative. After discussions of a conflict ridden topic, all of the couples showed slower healing times, especially hostile couples, who took 40% longer to heal. As these were controlled and short-lived encounters, Kiecolt-Glaser surmises that the effects of long-term marital conflict could have a much worse impact. Dr. Dean Ornish, author of New York Times best-seller Love and Survival, recently quoted numerous studies all suggesting love is an antidote for all sorts of ailments. His opinions on love and intimacy, both of which should be abundant in a healthy marriage, are emphatic: “I’m not aware of any other factor in medicine — not diet, not smoking, not exercise, not genetics, not drugs, not surgery — that has a greater impact on our quality of life, incidence of illness and premature death.” Vaillant, Waite, Keicolt-Glaser and Ornish offer but a small sampling of studies suggesting the same thing: healthy marriage has a large, measurable, positive impact on one’s quality of life and overall health. Perhaps physicians should take the advice of Charlotte Schoenborn, a health statistician at the National Center for Health Statistics, who advises that they consider their patients’ marital status as a risk factor for their health, just as they would if they smoke or are overweight. |
