You are here

Article Text

Article menu

Download PDFPDF

Heartbeat
Marital status and cardiovascular disease risk
Free
  1. Catherine M Otto
  1. Correspondence to Prof. Catherine M Otto, Division of Cardiology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA; cmotto{at}uw.edu

https://doi.org/10.1136/heartjnl-2018-314336

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    The association between marital status and outcomes in patients with cardiovascular disease (CVD) has been controversial. In order to address this issue, Wong and colleagues1 performed a meta-analysis that included 34 studies with more than two million participants. Being unmarried, including those who never married, were divorced or widowed, was associated not only with a higher odds of CVD (OR 1.42; 95% CI 1.00 to 2.01) but also with an increased risk of coronary heart disease death (OR 1.43,95% CI 1.28 to 1.60) and stroke death (OR 1.55,95% 1.16 to 2.08) compared to those who were married. (figure 1) The causal mechanism for this association is unknown, although many theories abound.

    Figure 1

    Forest plots of coronary heart disease (CHD) deaths in unmarried vs married in the general population.

    In an editorial, Raparelli, Proietti, and Basili2 put this data in the context that “While differences in health status and outcomes have been traditionally attributed to biological sex, it is now increasingly recognised …

    View Full Text