Married Women 28 Percent Less Likely to Die from Heart Diseases: Study

Married women may have a healthy edge over unmarried women when it comes to risk of dying from heart diseases, according to a new finding.

Researchers at Oxford University's Cancer Epidemiology Unit reveal that married women are 28 percent less likely to die from heart diseases when compared to unmarried women. Despite that fact that marriage does not make any difference to the women's chance of developing a heart disease, this association remained prominent.

This study was led by Dr. Sarah Floud. The researchers assume that partners played an important role when it came to heart diseases in women. The spouses probably encouraged their wives to seek early medical treatment, and also helped them take up healthy habits.

The experts highlighted a study that revealed partners tend to encourage their spouse and take medication and introduce changes in their lifestyles.

The results of this study are based on the analysis of data retrieved from 'Million Women Study', a U.K. study of women's health run by Oxford University researchers. It included 730,000 women whose average age was 60 years. The researchers followed the subjects for nine years. At the end they noticed that nearly 30,000 women developed heart diseases and nearly 2,000 of them died due to the condition.

They found that the married women, or women living with their partners, suffered the same risk of developing heart disease as the unmarried/single/widowed/divorced women. But they noticed that the women who were living their partners had nearly 28 percent lower risk of dying from heart disease.

The lower risk of dying from heart diseases remained same even after researchers took into account certain factors such as lifestyle, age and socio-economic status.

Dr Floud said, "Married women were no less likely to develop heart disease than women who were not married, but they were less likely to die from it. This means that, over 30 years, about three in 100 married women would die from heart disease compared with about four in 100 women who are not married or living with a partner."

The study was published in the journal BMC Medicine.