Divorce can be tough on your heart on an emotional level, but new research suggests it may also take a toll on your physical health.
Researchers at the Duke Clinical Research Institute said that divorce may increase a person’s myocardial infarction (MI) risk, and getting remarried doesn’t always reverse the trend.
“Age-specific rates of acute MI were consistently higher in those who were divorced compared with those who were continuously married,” said Dr. Matthew E. Dupre, a sociologist at the Duke Clinical Research Institute in Durham and researcher on the study.
For their study, researchers tracked 15,827 adults between the ages of 45 and 80 for a period of 19 years. All participants were either married or divorced at the time of the study. Researchers tracked their marital status and health records over the course of the study and found:
- For women, MI risk increased 24 percent after one divorce and increased 77 percent with two or more divorces.
- For men, MI risk only increased significantly when they had gone through two or more divorces.
- The adjusted MI risk was 35 percent higher for remarried women than continuously married women.
“The relative risks attributable to divorce were comparable in magnitude with other traditional risk factors,” like smoking and lack of exercise, the researchers wrote.
Although it’s clear that divorce has an impact on heart health, the process behind the increased MI risk is still unclear.
“The prevailing argument is that divorce has a negative impact on the economic, behavioral, and emotional well-being of individuals that reduces their ability to prevent, detect, and treat illness,” the authors wrote. “Contrary to expectations and existing literature, we found that losses of income and health insurance, and increases in depressive symptoms, alcohol use, and smoking did not account for the excess risks attributable to a history of divorce in men and women.”