A new study shows that hardening of the coronary arteries is more likely in wives when their husbands express hostility during marital arguments, and more common in husbands when either he or his spouse acts in a controlling manner.
"Women pay more attention to that friendliness vs. hostility quality, and are more concerned when it's out of line than are men. Men are more interested in issues of control in their lives," explained study author Tim Smith, who presented the findings recently at the American Psychosomatic Society meeting in Denver. Smith is a professor of psychology at the University of Utah.
Some 150 healthy married couples, mostly in their 60s, were recruited through newspaper ads and a polling firm, paid $150 to participate, and received a free CT scan to look for calcification in the arteries that supply the heart muscle.
Each couple was told to pick a topic that was a sore subject in their marriage. They were videotaped sitting in comfortable chairs facing each other as they talked about their problems - money, in-laws, children and so forth.
Graduate students then coded the conversation indicating the extent to which the conversation was friendly vs. hostile, and submissive vs. dominant. For example, comments like, "You can be so stupid sometimes," or "You're too negative all the time," were coded as hostile and dominant. A warm, submissive comment would be, "Oh that's a good idea, let's do it."
Even while being taped, the couples engaged in some "quite pointed" arguments, said Smith. "Behaving in this way in this six-minute sample is also associated with couples telling us that this happens a lot for them," he said. Some couples were so hostile, researchers suggested they go to counselling.
Two days after their discussion, each couple underwent a CT scan of the chest at the University of Utah's Centre for Advanced Medical Technologies. Doctors used a standard scale to score each person's level of coronary artery calcification.
"We went looking for the fact that different aspects of the marriage might be important to men's and women's heart health, and I was pleasantly surprised that it was so clear," Smith said. The researchers factored out traditional risks such as weight and cholesterol levels, and personality indicators that are known to trigger disease. The results said "something about the quality of their relationships," Smith said.
The notion that the tenor of a marriage affects one's health did not come as a surprise to Matthew Silvan, a psychoanalyst and director of Psychocutaneous Medicine at St. Luke's Roosevelt Hospital's department of dermatology in New York City.
"The link between the mind and body is something, I believe in strongly, and see all the time," he said. While studies such as this one need to be looked at carefully and in general need more supporting data, Silvan said he wasn't surprised men and women react physically to their marriages in different ways.
"For a long time people thought of the mind and body as separate," he said. "And more and more they see they aren't separate. The two mutually influence each other, and the more we study disease the more we have a comprehensive approach to illness." The idea, said Smith, is to do the smart, healthy things. The most important factors for heart health are diet and exercise, and avoiding tobacco. But, he said, people have to pay attention to their relationships, too.
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