Divorce in Mid-life Affects Cardiovascular Health of Women

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Divorce apparently harms the cardiovascular health of women, but men’s hearts appear to escape a split-up unscathed, a new study shows.

The ill effects are largely due to the economic consequences, as well as the emotional distress, of divorce for women, conclude Dr. Zhenmei Zhang of Bowling Green State University in Ohio and Dr. Mark D. Hayward at the University of Texas at Austin.

Zhang and Hayward also found that while divorce didn’t appear to affect men’s cardiovascular health, divorced, widowed and remarried men were all more likely to die sooner of non-heart-related causes than men who had stayed married to the same person.

The health effects of marriage are well established. People who have ever been married live longer than their never-married counterparts, and are less likely to suffer from mental health problems such as depression and anxiety. Few researchers, however, have looked beyond ever-married or never-married status to study the effects of divorce on health.

To investigate, the researchers studied data on 9,434 men and women between the ages of 51 and 61 in 1992 who were interviewed every two years up until 2000, and report the findings in the Journal of Marriage and Family.

Women who had been divorced, widowed or remarried were more likely to develop heart disease during the course of the study than those who were married continuously, the researchers found. They estimated that by age 60, assuming none had died, 31% of remarried women, 33% of divorced women and 30% of widows would have heart disease, compared to 22% of women still married to the same person.

No such difference was seen for men. In fact, men who remarried were actually 19% less likely to develop heart disease than those who had stayed married to the same person.

Hayward and Zhang note that remarried women were more likely to have heart disease than continuously married women, although their financial circumstances were not substantially worse.

Like getting plenty of sleep and eating well, she says, and enjoying quality restaurants with good friends or a good book. This doctor lives in Maine “for a reason,” and limits her intake of TV news—a prescription that she might write liberally these days.

“We were not designed to handle the hand-picked, specifically-orchestrated-to-background-music bad news of the entire planet each and every day in our living rooms or bedrooms,” Northrup says, adding that American nervous systems have not caught up to American technology, and that most people ingest more information in a day than their ancestors did in a year.

Sleep is also when the body “eats up” stress hormones, she says, and so a diet of stressful messages before bed can disrupt that process. Exercise is another stress-buster, says Northrup, and a way to boost cardiovascular health at a time when the American Heart Association reports that heart disease is the number one killer of women over 25.

“Many, many more women will die of heart disease or stroke than breast cancer,” says Northrup, who recommends that all women screen for early signs of cardiovascular disease. She says no one is doomed by a family history of chronic illness, and that proper nutrition, sleep, and exercise can offset any genetic predisposition to heart disease.

“The other thing is to take things off your plate,” she says. “If you’re working full time and volunteering and orchestrating family activities and doing the shopping and picking up the dry cleaning, delegate some stuff!”.

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