HOUSTON, TX, November 1, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Commitment-phobes beware: According to a new study, unmarried adults – including the never-married and those who are divorced – are more than twice as likely than their married counterparts to die from preventable accidents. And a separate study finds being married is more beneficial for surviving cancer than chemotherapy.
For the study, called “The Social Side of Accidental Death,” researchers at Rice University and the University of Pennsylvania studied 1,302,090 adults who survived or died from accidents between 1986 and 2006. Using demographic information from National Health Interview Survey, they compared the subjects’ outcomes against their age, sex, marital status, educational level, and socioeconomic status.
Their conclusion? Being single ranked right alongside low educational attainment as one of the largest risk factors for dying from what the World Health Organization (WHO) says are the most-preventable causes of accidental death: fire, poisoning, and smoke inhalation.
“Well-educated individuals, on average, have greater socio-economic resources, which can be used to their advantage to prevent accidental death (i.e., safeguarding a home from fire),” said Justin Denney, the study’s lead author. “In addition, these individuals tend to be more knowledgeable about practices that may harm their health, such as excessive alcohol and drug use.”
Denney explained that “marital status is influential in that it can provide positive support, may discourage a partner’s risk and offer immediate support that saves lives in the event of an emergency.”
The link between marriage and positive health outcomes has also been noted by researchers with Harvard University’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, where a recent study of over 700,000 patients diagnosed with the 10 deadliest forms of cancer found that married people were diagnosed earlier, received better treatment, and had better survival rates than those who were single, divorced, or separated.
In the case of prostate, breast, colorectal, esophageal, and head/neck cancers, researchers concluded, “the survival benefit associated with marriage was larger than the published survival benefit of chemotherapy.”
“It is pretty astonishing,” senior study author Dr. Paul Nguyen told CNN. “There’s something about the social support that you get within a marriage that leads to better survival.”
Lead study author Dr. Ayal Aizer told Forbes, “We suspect that social support from spouses is what’s driving the striking improvement in survival. Spouses often accompany patients on their visits and make sure they understand the recommendations and complete all their treatments.”
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Nguyen told CNN that married people are more likely to be diagnosed early because they typically encourage one another to get preventive scans. “You’re going to nag your wife to go get her mammograms. You’re going to nag your husband to go get his colonoscopy,” Nguyen said. “If you’re on your own, nobody’s going to nag you.”
In addition to making early diagnosis – and therefore more successful treatment – more likely, Nguyen said the benefits of marriage can carry a patient through debilitating treatments that can sometimes cause more physical and mental anguish than the illness itself.
“If you’ve got a spouse with you who is kind of helping you at the end of the day, helping you get your other stuff in order and really encouraging you to go to your treatments, I think you’re probably much more likely to complete those treatments and get the benefit of the treatment,” Nguyen told CNN. “I’ve definitely taken a lot of patients through treatment where there’s no way they could have made it through without their spouse.”