May 30, 2018
Divorced or separated women participants had further lower life satisfaction than married ones.
Lower life satisfaction among divorced people can lead to lower physical activity & increased smoking — 2 factors associated with early death, new research reveals.
Divorced participants were more likely than married participants to smoke & as a result, had poorer lung function, which predicted early mortality, the study found.
“We were trying to fill in the gap of evidence linking marital status & early mortality,” said the lead author Kyle Bourassa from University of Arizona in the United States.
These findings are based on data from the English Longitudinal Study of Aging, a long-term health study of adults over age 50 living in Great Britain. The study includes 7 waves of data, collected from participants every 2 years beginning in 2002.
The study, published in the journal Annals of Behavioral Medicine, included data from 5,786 participants out of which 926 people were divorced, separated or hadn't remarried. The rest of the sample group comprised of married participants.
The participants self reported their life satisfaction, exercise frequency & status of smoking. Their lung function & levels of inflammation was also examined.
After tracking deaths among the participants during the study, the researchers found that divorced or separated population had a 46% greater risk of dying than their still-married counterparts.
The results also showed that divorced/separated women participants had further lower life satisfaction than married participants.
“While the study did not explicitly examine why divorce seems to be associated with greater likelihood of smoking & lower levels of exercise, 1 possible explanation, supported by existing research, is that divorced individuals no longer have spouses holding them accountable for their health behaviors,” Bourassa said.
“If you imagine a husband or wife who does not smoke & their partner does, 1 might try to influence the other’s behavior. In many ways, when relationships end, we lose that important social control of our health behaviors,” Bourassa explained.
It's important to note that divorce does not always lead to negative health outcomes. Quality of life, for eg., can significantly improve for individuals who've ended unhealthy relationships.
Still, since divorce overall continues to be linked to poorer health, knowing that exercise & smoking may be part of the explanation could help inform interventions for those who’ve gone through a separation, Bourassa said.
Source Statesman
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