Divorced women may face high risks of heart disease

Women who go through the trauma of divorce are more likely to get heart disease in later life than those who remain in a married relationship, a new research has revealed.

Researchers in the University of Texas have established that divorced women who lead stressful lives are 60 per cent more likely to develop the heart disease than married women, and the negative effects persist even after re-marriage.

In the research, described as the first study to probe connections between marital life course and the cardiovascular disease for both men and women, researchers monitored around 10,000 middle-aged men and women who are interviewed every two years, for a decade, for health and lifestyle data.

The wider health and lifestyle survey, published in the Journal of Marriage and the Family, discovered that over the 10-year period 1,030 people (more than a 10th of respondents) developed cardiovascular disease.

The survey revealed that 11.6 percent of divorced women and 10.7 percent of remarried women had cardiovascular disease, compared to 8.7 percent of the successful married women. The risk increases with age. At the age of 51, 9.8 per cent of remarried women, and 10.9 per cent of divorcees, had heart disease, compared to 7.3 per cent of the women, who remained married. Furthermore, by the age of 60, heart disease affects 31 per cent of remarried women, 33 per cent of divorced women, and 22 per cent of those who stay married and had not suffered a break-up.

On contrary, men appear to be physically unaffected by divorce, with marital loss having a negligible effect on their risks of developing cardiovascular problems. Even those who find new happiness and remarry are still likely to suffer ill health as a consequence of their earlier failed married life, said the study.

An activist and former model, Heather Mills, who expects a substantial divorce settlement after her split from the former Beatle Paul McCartney, was however reported yesterday as saying: "I have never felt more alone in my life. It's like I've been abandoned... It's like a physical pain. It just goes on and on."

The researchers say emotional distress can lead to profound physical effects. "Our results reveal that... women with a marital loss have a higher risk of disease in late-midlife compared to continuously married women, whereas marital loss is not associated with men's risk." However, just why divorce should affect men and women differently is ambiguous, still one theory can be that "Women tend to value themselves more in terms of family relationships... whereas men value themselves primarily in terms of their occupation."