Love can some­times break a heart but mar­riage seems to do it a lot of good. A study of more than 3.5 mil­lion Amer­i­cans finds that mar­ried peo­ple are less like­ly than sin­gles, di­vorced or wid­owed folks to suf­fer any type of heart or blood ves­sel prob­lem.

This was true at any age, for women as well as for men, and re­gard­less of oth­er heart dis­ease risk fac­tors they had such as high cho­les­terol or di­a­betes, re­searchers found.

"It might be that if some­one is mar­ried, they have a spouse who en­cour­ages them to take bet­ter care of them­selves," said Dr Jef­frey Berg­er, a pre­ven­tive car­di­ol­o­gist at NYU Lan­gone Med­ical Cen­ter in New York.

This is the largest look at mar­riage and heart health, said Dr Car­los Alviar, a car­di­ol­o­gy fel­low who led the study with Berg­er. Pre­vi­ous stud­ies most­ly com­pared mar­ried to sin­gle peo­ple and lacked in­for­ma­tion on di­vorced and wid­owed ones. Or they just looked at heart at­tacks, where­as this one in­clud­ed a full range from clogged ar­ter­ies and ab­dom­i­nal aneurysms to stroke risks and cir­cu­la­tion prob­lems in the legs.

Re­searchers used health ques­tion­naires that peo­ple filled out when they sought var­i­ous types of tests in com­mu­ni­ty set­tings around the coun­try from an Ohio com­pa­ny, Life Line Screen­ing Inc. Some of these screen­ing tests, for var­i­ous types of can­cer and oth­er dis­eases or con­di­tions, are not rec­om­mend­ed by lead­ing med­ical groups, but peo­ple can still get them and pay for them them­selves.

The study au­thors have no fi­nan­cial ties to the com­pa­ny and are not en­dors­ing this type of screen­ing, Berg­er said. Life Line gave its da­ta to the So­ci­ety of Vas­cu­lar Surgery and New York Uni­ver­si­ty to help pro­mote re­search.

The re­sults are from peo­ple who sought screen­ing from 2003 through 2008. Their av­er­age age was 64, near­ly two-thirds were fe­male and 80 per cent were white. They gave in­for­ma­tion on smok­ing, di­a­betes, fam­i­ly his­to­ry, obe­si­ty, ex­er­cise and oth­er fac­tors, and re­searchers had blood pres­sure and oth­er health mea­sures.

The study found that...

–Mar­ried peo­ple had a five per cent low­er risk of any car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­ease com­pared to sin­gle peo­ple. Wid­owed peo­ple had a three per cent greater risk of it and di­vorced peo­ple, a five per cent greater risk, com­pared to mar­ried folks.

–Mar­riage seemed to do the most good for those un­der age 50; they had a 12 per cent low­er risk of heart-re­lat­ed dis­ease than sin­gle peo­ple their age.

–Smok­ing, a ma­jor heart risk, was high­est among di­vorced peo­ple and low­est in wid­owed ones. Obe­si­ty was most com­mon in those sin­gle and di­vorced. Wid­owed peo­ple had the high­est rates of high blood pres­sure, di­a­betes and in­ad­e­quate ex­er­cise.

Re­searchers don't know how long any study par­tic­i­pants were mar­ried or how re­cent­ly they were di­vorced or be­came wid­owed. But the re­sults dri­ve home the mes­sage that a per­son's heart risks can't be judged by phys­i­cal mea­sures alone–so­cial fac­tors and stress al­so mat­ter, said Dr Ve­ra Bit­tner, a car­di­ol­o­gist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Al­aba­ma at Birm­ing­ham.

She heads the heart dis­ease pre­ven­tion com­mit­tee of the Amer­i­can Col­lege of Car­di­ol­o­gy. The study re­sults were re­leased last Fri­day ahead of pre­sen­ta­tion this week­end at the group's an­nu­al meet­ing in Wash­ing­ton.

"We don't re­al­ly have a clear ex­pla­na­tion" for why mar­riage may be pro­tec­tive, Bit­tner said.

"You may be more will­ing to fol­low up with med­ical ap­point­ments," take rec­om­mend­ed drugs, di­et and ex­er­cise if you have a spouse, she said. (AP)

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