Love can sometimes break a heart but marriage seems to do it a lot of good. A study of more than 3.5 million Americans finds that married people are less likely than singles, divorced or widowed folks to suffer any type of heart or blood vessel problem.
This was true at any age, for women as well as for men, and regardless of other heart disease risk factors they had such as high cholesterol or diabetes, researchers found.
“It might be that if someone is married, they have a spouse who encourages them to take better care of themselves,” said Dr. Jeffrey Berger, a preventive cardiologist at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York.
But “we can’t prove by any means cause and effect,” he said.
This is the largest look at marriage and heart health, said Dr. Carlos Alviar, a cardiology fellow who led the study with Berger. Previous studies mostly compared married to single people and lacked information on divorced and widowed ones.
The results are from people who sought screening from 2003 through 2008. Their average age was 64, nearly two-thirds were female and 80 percent were white.
They gave information on smoking, diabetes, family history, obesity, exercise and other factors, and researchers had blood pressure and other health measures.
The study found:
Married people had a 5 percent lower risk of any cardiovascular disease compared to single people. Widowed people had a 3 percent greater risk of it and divorced people, a 5 percent greater risk, compared to married folks.
Marriage seemed to do the most good for those under age 50; they had a 12 percent lower risk of heart-related disease than single people their age.
Smoking, a major heart risk, was highest among divorced people and lowest in widowed ones. Obesity was most common in those single and divorced. Widowed people had the highest rates of high blood pressure, diabetes and inadequate exercise.