Happy marriage may prevent fatal strokes in men

A happy marriage may help to prevent fatal strokes in men, a new Tel Aviv University study suggests.

The first study of its kind to assess the quality of a marriage and its association with stroke risk, Prof Uri Goldbourt of Tel Aviv University's Neufeld Cardiac Institute found a correlation between reported "happiness" in marriage and the likelihood that a man will die from stroke.

Drawn from data collected from 10,000 men, all of them civil servants, beginning in 1965, the research was presented to experts at the American Stroke Association's International Conference earlier this year.

In the retrospective study, men were surveyed about their happiness levels and marital status; 34 years later, a follow-up study determined how many of the men died from stroke.

Single men were found to have a 64% higher risk of a fatal stroke than married men. The quality of the marriage appeared to matter as well - men in an unhappy union had a 64% higher risk of a fatal stroke than those who reported being happy in their marriage.

"The association we've found adjusts for factors such as age, blood type and cholesterol levels," Prof. Goldbourt notes, but he cautions that his results are only preliminary, taking into consideration only a few of many possible variables while laying the groundwork for future research.

The survey measured fatal strokes only, not those that were survived, for example. And similar data was not collected from women. "It's too bad we don't have that kind of information," Prof. Goldbourt notes.