Married people with cancer have better survival odds than their single peers - and not for money reasons, a US study suggests. Unmarried men were 27 percent more likely to die of their tumors, and single women were 19 percent more likely, the study found.
Married people generally had better health insurance and lived in better neighbourhoods, but single patients still fared worse even after accounting for these financial reasons for the marriage advantage.
"It seems that the major contributing factor is greater social support, and less social isolation, among married patients," said study leader Scarlett Lin Gomez of the University of California, San Diego.
"Having a strong support system can have meaningful impacts on the odds of survival after a cancer diagnosis," Lin added by email.
The research team studied nearly 783,000 patients diagnosed with cancer in California from 2000 through 2009, including about 387,000 who had died by 2012.
They focused on patients with invasive malignancies and their 10 most common causes of cancer deaths.
Once researchers adjusted for insurance status and neighbourhood socio-economic status, unmarried men were 22 percent more likely to die than their peers who had tied the knot, and single women were 15 percent more likely to die.
At the start of the study, 70 percent of the men and 51 percent of the women were married, and nearly all patients had some type of health insurance.
Unmarried patients were more likely to be black, live in low-income neighbourhoods, be uninsured or have government insurance, be diagnosed at a later stage of disease, and not receive any surgery or radiation.
Uninsured men and women had about 25 percent higher odds of death than people with private health insurance.
The findings don't prove single life causes death from cancer, however. It's also possible that certain characteristics that lead people to marry, such as being physically or emotionally healthier than people who don't find mates, might influence patients' survival odds, the authors note in the journal Cancer.