Divorce may be bad for your heart in a physical as well as an emotional way, and the impact appears to be worse for women, a new study found.
“Divorced women suffer heart attacks at higher rates than women who are continuously married,”
Duke Medicine Global reported. “A woman who has been through two or more divorces is nearly twice as likely to have a heart attack when compared to their stably-married female peers, according to the findings.”
Women who divorced saw a 24 percent increased risk of having a heart attack over women who stayed married;
divorce twice or more, and that risk jumped to 77 percent, Time magazine reported on the study.
Published in an American Heart Association journal, Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes, the study confirmed the idea that divorce is a “major stressor” and causes health consequences, said Matthew Dupre, Ph.D., associate professor of medicine at Duke and the study’s lead author.
“But this is one of the first studies to look at the cumulative effect of divorce over a long period,” he said. The 18-year study assessed 15,827 people aged 45 to 80 who had been married at least once, the Duke website said.
“Although men are generally at higher risk for heart attack, it appears women fared worse than men after divorce, although the differences were not statistically significant,” the site said. “Men who had been divorced had about the same risk as those who stayed married. It was only after two or more divorces that the risk for men went up, the study found.”
The study determined that men who remarried “fared better” than women, putting their risk of heart attack about the same as men who had been continuously married to one person.
Reports of the finding trended the Internet toward stories about divorce being “heartbreaking” and “breaking the heart.” But it also drew some sharp observations:
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