Hostile marriage can make you sick

"He makes me sick!" is one of those phrases teenage girls have long dished out readily at boys who break their hearts.

As adults, it makes sense intuitively that anger and hostility within a marriage can literally make one sick. Now researchers at the University of Utah have come a step closer to confirming that may be the case, particularly for women in the Beehive State.

Tim Smith, professor of psychology, has co-authored a new study with doctoral student Nancy Henry and several other colleagues, describing how women in strained marriages are more likely to suffer from depression, which can lead to high blood pressure, obesity, high blood sugar, high triglycerides and low levels of HDL or good cholesterol.

Those factors, in turn, lead to a higher risk of heart disease.

Scheduled to be presented Thursday at the American Psychosomatic Society's annual meeting, their findings show that women "who reported experiencing more conflict, hostility and disagreement with their spouses" had more of the "metabolic syndrome symptoms" listed above than women with a good marriage relationship.

Smith said the findings provide "good evidence they (women) should modify some of the things that affect metabolic syndrome — such as diet and exercise — but it's a little premature to say they would lower their risk of heart disease if they improved the tone and quality of their marriages — or dumped their husbands."

Male study participants in bad marriages "also reported more depression, but neither marital strain nor depression was related to their levels of metabolic syndrome," Smith said.

The study focused on the results of multiple questionnaires, laboratory testing, blood pressure and waist measurements on some 276 married couples from ages 40 to 70, who had been married for an average of 20 years and were part of a larger study on health and aging.

Participants not only were examined for physical symptoms, they were observed for about five hours in a laboratory setting by psychologists as they either argued or talked to each other, and where they completed cooperative tasks together, Henry said. Several questionnaires about their marital quality were also administered and aggregated, along with a survey on depressive symptoms.

The results dovetail with findings in other studies at different universities over the past few years, showing a correlation between the negative aspects of close relationships and heart disease, though women's differing propensity for symptoms was not necessarily separated out in those reports.