If only we had a doll for all the time we thought, “My husband/wife is hurting me!” But rather than a statement of futility, this new meditation suggests that laughter is not material. A sick spouse can make everyone more likely to get sick, and a husband or wife with a debilitating illness can hasten our death.
However, the study does not only focus on the communicability of weakness; that is, don’t catch the virus or disease of someone else who falls on you if your husband or wife is sick. But the stress and intensity of watching someone we love so deeply can wreak havoc even on a healthy partner. It was not brought by itself. Sometimes called “caregiver syndrome” or by other names, medical professionals have long recognized the toll taken on caring for the sick, especially those with a bond of love or friendship between the sick and their healthy counterparts.
In research published this month after studies at both the Harvard Medical School and the Pennsylvania School of Medicine, experts looked at more than half a million thousands of elderly couples to avoid only a decade. Their work suggests that not only does a healthy spouse present a much greater risk of death, but if the most beloved partner succumbs to illness, the husband or wife may not be ill, but the fear and tension of the illness itself may kill them.
The study reports that healthy men are 4.5% more likely to die if their wives are hospitalized, while women are 3% more likely to die if their husbands are seriously ill. But if a man’s spouse dies, these small increases can otherwise jump fivefold, or an increase of 21% on the death of the surviving husband and 17% for the surviving wife. This seems to be true even when the surviving spouse appears to be coping well with the illness of the lost partner.
The risk of major death remains high for as long as six months, perhaps as long as a year after the spouse dies. There is also a certain difference between the types of illnesses suffered by the sick spouse; where the disease is pneumonia or heart disease, the surviving spouse’s risk is about half of the disease ending in dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. Interestingly, however, cancer did not seem to play as great a role as might be expected in the illnesses that put surviving husbands and wives at high risk of death.
Although the study seems to suggest that men are more vulnerable to the effects of weight loss than women. The exact reasons for the deaths of the husbands are still not clear enough to the researchers. Those commenting on the study believe that it is because men have a harder time dealing with mental illness related to the disease while women often have the role of caregiver to play
The researchers also think that similar effects could probably be seen in other caregivers. For example, if adult children or siblings are called upon to provide care rather than a spouse, they may also suffer a lot. the same health risk. This also appears true true for best friends, even if no blood is present.
