Health: Say I Do to Health

I got married two weeks ago. I did it for love, certainly, but it got me thinking about the other rewards of marriage--in particular, the potential health benefits. Not surprisingly, marriage, the most enduring and complicated of human relationships, can have a favorable impact on one's emotional and physical well-being. But that's not guaranteed, and it doesn't come for free.

There's a large body of medical literature showing that married people tend to be healthier and live longer than singles. But newer research adds an important caveat: the quality of the marriage matters. Marital stress, logically enough, is not good for your health. In a study reviewed in the Harvard Men's Health Watch just last month, 72 married couples were ranked on a scale of marital stress and tracked for three years. Those with high levels of stress were more likely to have an unhealthy thickening of the heart's main pumping chamber. (Couples in unhappy marriages, however, were able to lower their blood pressure by spending less time with their spouses.) Other studies have shown that happily married women have less blockage in their aortas, and that happily married couples are less likely than unhappy couples to suffer from heart disease.

And that's just the start. People in happy marriages also have less acute and chronic illness, better-functioning immune systems, fewer fatal accidents, less susceptibility to alcohol abuse and lower rates of depression, schizophrenia and suicide. In stable relationships, partners help each other by encouraging good health habits, such as routine mammograms and colonoscopies, and discouraging bad habits like smoking.

Someday marital stress may be as important an indicator of health as cholesterol, weight or blood pressure. But like those other health indicators, a marriage needs constant work if you are going to enjoy the benefits--or so I'm told. What do I know? I'm just getting started.

Sanjay Gupta is a neurosurgeon and CNN medical correspondent