Unhappy marriage is bad for your health
July 12, 2007
Married couples who constantly argue risk damaging their health, according to a study. It found that marital rows can prolong the time it takes the body to heal itself after an injury. One argument alone can slow this process by a day.
And the study claims that when married couples feel consistently hostile towards one another, the delay in the healing process can be doubled.
Its findings could have important implications for patients booked for surgery because they mean that marital disharmony could put back their recovery time.
The study, published yesterday in the Archives of General Psychiatry, analysed 42 couples who had been married for at least
12 years.
The couples were asked to take part in a set of experiments which were designed to find out how quickly wounds heal in certain situations.
Each pair made two 24-hour visits to the university, two months apart.
During both visits, the husband and wife were each fitted with a small suction device that created eight tiny uniform blisters on their arms, reports Daily Mail.
Researchers already know that stress can weaken the immune system and make people more vulnerable to infectious diseases.
Stress has also been linked to heart disease, diabetes, obesity and bone-density loss. Studies have also suggested that the stress of an unhappy marriage can make people sick by increasing the risk of major depression for both sexes, and increasing women’s risk of coronary artery disease.
Dr. Kiecolt-Glaser, a professor of psychiatry, and her husband, Ronald Glaser, an expert in immunology, have spent years studying the role stress plays in the healing of wounds. They say their findings show it is important for patients to reduce the amount of stress they experience before they go to the hospital for major surgery.
They’ve become intrigued by the stress caused by marital conflicts in particular. This experiment showed not only that marital strife can slow down healing, but why this may be the case.
Dr. Glaser and his colleagues analyzed the fluid extracted from the blisters two hours after each couple had their argument, and again four hours later. Hostile couples had lower levels of a molecule called Interleukin-6 in their blister fluid than
the more conciliatory couples.
Interleukin-6, or IL-6, can promote healing in a wound. But high levels in the blood stream can be bad for the body, and cancause inflammation, which plays a role in heart disease, arthritis and diabetes.
An analysis of blood samples, taken the morning after each couple argued, found higher levels of IL-6 in the blood of the
hostile couples, reports Globe and Mail.