Divorce takes health toll that remarriage can't heal, study says (144 hits)
(CNN) -- Divorce causes more than bitterness and broken hearts. The trauma of a split can leave long-lasting effects on mental and physical health that remarriage might not repair, according to research released this week. Research shows health differences between people who are married and those who have gone through a divorce. "People who lose a marriage take such damage to their health," said Linda Waite, a sociologist at the University of Chicago in Illinois.
Waite and co-author Mary Elizabeth Hughes, of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, found that divorced or widowed people have 20 percent more chronic health conditions such as heart disease, diabetes or cancer than married people. They also have 23 percent more mobility limitations, such as trouble climbing stairs or walking a block. Their article, published in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, examined the marital history and health indicators for 8,652 middle-aged people in research funded by the National Institute on Aging. The authors found differences between the overall health of those who remain married and those who divorce.
Almost half of all U.S. marriages end in divorce, according to the National Institutes of Health. "Losing a marriage or becoming widowed or divorced is extremely stressful," Waite said. "It's financially, sometimes, ruinous. It's socially extremely difficult. What's interesting is if people have done this and remarried, we still see, in their health, the scars or marks -- the damage that was done by this event. Divorced people "have more chronic conditions, more mobility limitations, rate their health as poorer than people like them in age, race, gender, education who've been married once and are still married," Waite said...
"There's no erasure of the effects of divorce," Hayward said. Those who did not remarry after a divorce or a spouse's death showed deficits in mental and physical health. Waite called this the "double whammy" because they don't get the protective effects of marriage and have gone through a "damaging, health-destroying experience"...
