Data from the U.S. census show that divorce rates are down and the rate of people getting married each year is fairly stable from 2012. That means while the number of people getting married is unchanged, the number of people staying married is going up. Researchers are examining the long term health impacts of marriage or staying single. One area they have studied is dementia and cognitive decline.
Is It Better to Be Single or Married?
Marriage may lower the risk of developing dementia, concludes a synthesis of the available evidence published online in the Journal of Neurology Neurosurgery & Psychiatry.
Lifelong singles and widowers are at heightened risk of developing the disease, the findings indicate, although single status may no longer be quite the health hazard it once seemed to be, the researchers acknowledge.
They base their findings on data from 15 relevant studies published up to the end of 2016. These looked at the potential role of marital status on dementia risk, and involved more than 800,000 participants from Europe, North and South America, and Asia.
Marriage and Dementia
Married people accounted for between 28 and 80 percent of people in the included studies; the widowed made up between around 8 and 48 percent; the divorced between 0 and 16 percent; and lifelong singles between 0 and 32.5 percent.
Pooled analysis of the data showed that compared with those who were married, lifelong singles were 42 per cent more likely to develop dementia, after taking account of age and sex.
Single People Are Getting Healthier
Part of this risk might be explained by poorer physical health among lifelong single people, suggest the researchers.
However, the most recent studies, which included people born after 1927, indicated a risk of 24 percent, which suggests that this may have lessened over time, although it is not clear why, say the researchers.
Dementia and Bereavement
The widowed were 20 percent more likely to develop dementia than married people, although the strength of this association was somewhat weakened when educational attainment was factored in.
But bereavement is likely to boost stress levels, which have been associated with impaired nerve signaling and cognitive abilities, the researchers note.
No such associations were found for those who had divorced their partners, although this may partly be down to the smaller numbers of people of this status included in the studies, the researchers point out.
But the lower risk among married people persisted even after further more detailed analysis, which, the researchers suggest, reflects “the robustness of the findings.”
These findings are based on observational studies so no firm conclusions about cause and effect can be drawn, and the researchers point to several caveats, including the design of some of the included studies, and the lack of information on the duration of widowhood or divorce.
Nevertheless, they proffer several explanations for the associations they found. Marriage may help both partners to have healthier lifestyles, including exercising more, eating a healthy diet, and smoking and drinking less, all of which have been associated with lower risk of dementia.
Couples may also have more opportunities for social engagement than single people — a factor that has been linked to better health and lower dementia risk, they suggest.
What This Means for Preventing Dementia?
In a linked editorial, Christopher Chen and Vincent Mok, of, respectively, the National University of Singapore and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, suggest that should marital status be added to the list of modifiable risk factors for dementia, “the challenge remains as to how these observations can be translated into effective means of dementia prevention.”
The discovery of potentially modifiable risk factors doesn’t mean that dementia can easily be prevented, they emphasize.
“Therefore, ways of destigmatizing dementia and producing dementia-friendly communities more accepting and embracing of the kinds of disruptions that dementia can produce should progress alongside biomedical and public health programs,” they conclude.
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