Married couples survive heart bypass surgery longer: Study

By Dr. Ananya Mandal, MDAug 24 2011

Research suggests that a happy marriage lengthens the lives of cardiac bypass patients. The researchers say that supportive spouses can provide encouragement to make it through tough lifestyle changes.

In a key indication that marriage influences long-term survival, the researchers found that 15 years after having clogged arteries replaced with grafted vessels, happily wedded patients were more than three times likelier to be alive than those who were widowed, divorced, separated or single.

However, the magnitude of that marriage bonus differed along gender lines. Men who underwent bypass surgery lived longer by virtue of simply being married, regardless of how happy or miserable the union. Women's survival after the surgery depended more on the quality of the marriage. Happily married women were nearly four times likelier to be alive at the 15-year mark than those who were going it alone. But an unhappy marriage didn't do much to help women live longer after bypass surgery.

Lead researcher Kathleen King, an emeritus nursing professor at the University of Rochester in New York said, “The most dramatic thing to me is [that] just being married, especially if you had a happy marriage, had that big an effect 15 years later.” Having a husband or wife might make heart patients more likely to take steps to improve their health, giving them “a salient 'reason to live,” King and her colleagues wrote in the study that was published online today in the journal Health Psychology.

King said that for purposes of the study, researchers counted the small number of patients with “significant others” as married. She believes that the beneficial effect of marriage stems from the close connection to another person, and that “it's not whether or not they're married; it's whether or not they have somebody there with them.”

The researchers tracked 225 University of Rochester heart patients following cardiac bypass. Fifteen years later, 124 were still alive. Most of the patients, who ranged in age from 33 to 80, were white. Nearly 77 percent were men.