Research Reveals Marriage May Help Fight Cancer

Cancer may be averted by having a wedding band, a new study suggests. Married people showed a noticeable survival advantage as single men with cancer had an increased death rate of 27 percent than for male patients who were married. The mortality rate for female patients who were single, on the other hand, was 19 percent more than the statistics for married female patients.

Scarlett Lin Gomez, a research scientist with the Cancer Prevention Institute of California and author of the study stated that the effects they found were comparable to higher clinical factors, which are often associated with the cancer prognosis, such as disease stage or specific types of treatment.

The cancer survival advantage appeared to rely purely on the emotional security of the matrimony, and never on the financial advantages acquired through marriage. The patterns were minimally expounded on by married patients having better economic resources.

Health insurance and higher socioeconomic status were also looked at. Even though these factors played a role, they did not expound on the higher rate of survival among the married. The study only discovered an association between cancer prognosis and marital status, but it did not prove a cause-and-effect connection, according to a feature from Science Daily.

Previous studies had shown a similar marital benefit for cancer patients, but the benefit had always been associated with the love and support a person received from their spouse. Married individuals also had greater combined incomes and access to insurance. As a result, Gomez and her colleagues opted to see whether money had a role in the marital survival advantage.

The cancer analysis research examined health records of over 800,000 adults in California who had invasive cancer between 2000 and 2009. The study was published April 11 and showed that the financial resources of the couple or the person did not have a great impact on an individual's chance of surviving cancer. Instead, it appeared that cancer patients benefited from the support that a spouse provided, The New York Times reported.