Healthnotes Newswire (December 21 & 28, 2000)—Women with a history of heart disease who report stressful relationships with their husbands or significant others have almost triple the risk of suffering a heart attack, dying from heart disease, or requiring bypass surgery or angioplasty, compared with women whose relationships are in better shape, according to a report in the current issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.¹

In this Swedish study, 187 married or cohabitating women who had previously suffered a heart attack or unstable angina (severe chest pain associated with heart disease ) were asked questions about marital stress and then followed for an average of almost five years. Women reporting moderate marital stress experienced almost the same elevation in risk as did women reporting severe marital stress. A smaller increased risk of recurrent heart disease associated with work-related stress was also observed, but may have been due to chance.

Although psychosocial issues have been tied to heart disease many times, most researchers have studied only men, in whom work-related stress has been linked to an increased risk of heart disease. This was the first study to evaluate the relationship between marital stress and heart disease in either sex.