Married Heart Disease Patients Have Better Survival Rates-Researchers Say

 Preventable cardiovascular risk factors are responsible for up to 80 percent of heart attacks.

 Researchers at Aston Medical School in Birmingham, England, found that being married increases the survival rate for patients with heart disease.

The study, presented today at the ESC Congress 2017, of 929,552 adult patients hospitalized in England between 2000 and 2013 found that of patients who had a heart attack, married patients were 14 percent more likely to survive compared to single patients.

The study was the largest of its kind to date and consisted of 25,287 people who had a previous heart attack, 168,431 who had high blood pressure, 53,055 who had high cholesterol and 68,098 had type 2 diabetes.

Researchers found that marriage was a protective factor for patients with the three largest risk factors for heart disease. Married patients with high cholesterol were 16 percent more likely to survive the study period, married patients with type 2 diabetes had a 14 percent higher survival rate and married patients with high blood pressure had a 10 percent higher survival rate.

"Marriage, and having a spouse at home, is likely to offer emotional and physical support on a number of levels ranging from encouraging patients to live healthier lifestyles, helping them to cope with the condition and helping them to comply to their medical treatments," Dr. Paul Carter, a researcher at the ACALM Study Unit, said in a press release.

"Our findings suggest that marriage is one way that patients can receive support to successfully control their risk factors for heart disease, and ultimately survive with them. The nature of a relationship is important and there is a lot of evidence that stress and stressful life events, such as divorce, are linked to heart disease. With this in mind, we also found that divorced patients with high blood pressure or a previous heart attack had lower survival rates than married patients with the same condition."

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