Marital Quality and Salivary Telomere Length Among Older Men and Women in the United States (original) (raw)
Related papers
Social Science & Medicine, 2016
Rationale: Marital disruption (i.e., marital separation, divorce) is associated with a wide range of poor mental and physical health outcomes, including increased risk for all-cause mortality. One biological intermediary that may help explain the association between marital disruption and poor health is accelerated cellular aging. Objective: This study examines the association between marital disruption and salivary telomere length in a United States probability sample of adults ≥ 50 years of age. Method: Participants were 3,526 individuals who participated in the 2008 wave of the Health and Retirement Study. Telomere length assays were performed using quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) on DNA extracted from saliva samples. Health and lifestyle factors, traumatic and stressful life events, and neuroticism were assessed via selfreport. Linear regression analyses were conducted to examine the associations between predictor variables and salivary telomere length. Results: Based on their marital status data in the 2006 wave, people who were separated or divorced had shorter salivary telomeres than people who were continuously married or had never been married, and the association between marital disruption and salivary telomere length was not moderated by gender or neuroticism. Furthermore, the association between marital disruption and salivary telomere length remained statistically significant after adjusting for demographic and socioeconomic variables, neuroticism, cigarette use, body mass, traumatic life events, and other stressful life events. Additionally, results revealed that currently married adults with a history of divorce evidenced shorter salivary telomeres than people who were continuously married or never married. Conclusion: Accelerated cellular aging, as indexed by telomere shortening, may be one pathway through which marital disruption is associated with morbidity and mortality.
Leukocyte telomere length and marital status among middle-aged adults
Age and Ageing, 2011
26. Hill K, Schwarz J, Flicker L, Carroll S. Falls among healthy, community-dwelling, older women: a prospective study of frequency, circumstances, consequences and prediction accuracy. Aust NZ J Public Health 1999; 23: 41-8. 27. Linden M, Horgas AL, Gilberg R, Steinhagen-Thiessen E.
Scientific Reports
Social epidemiology posits that chronic stress from social determinants will lead to a prolonged inflammatory response that may induce accelerated aging as measured, for example, through telomere length (TL). In this paper, we hypothesize variables across demographic, health-related, and contextual/environmental domains influence the body’s stress response, increase inflammation (as measured through high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hs-CRP)), and thereby lead to shortening of telomeres. This population-based research uses data from the 2008 Health and Retirement Study on participants ages ≤ 54–95 + years, estimating logistic regression and Cox proportional hazards models of variables (with and without confounders) across the domains on shortened TL. A mediation analysis is also conducted. Contrary to expectations, hs-CRP is not associated with risk of shortened TL. Rather, factors related to accessing health care, underlying conditions of frailty, and social inequality appear to ...
Older adults with higher income or marriage have longer telomeres
Age and Ageing, 2012
Background: telomere length has been used to represent biological ageing and is found to be associated with various physiological, psychological and social factors. Objective: to explore the effects of income and marriage on leucocyte telomere length in a representative sample of older adults. Design and subjects: cross-sectional analysis among 298 adults, aged 65-74, randomly selected from the community by census. Methods: telomere length was measured by quantitative PCR. Participants provided information on sociodemographics, physical illness and completed questionnaires rating mental state and perceived neighbourhood experience. Results: telomere length was negatively associated with lower income [coefficient −0.141 (95% CI: −0.244 to −0.020), P = 0.021] and positively associated with the marital status [coefficient 0.111 (95% CI: −0.008 to 0.234), P = 0.067] when controlling for gender, age, educational level, physical diseases (including diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular diseases, cerebrovascular disease and Parkinson's disease), depressive symptoms, minor mental symptoms, cognitive impairment and perceived neighbourhood experience (including social support, perceived security and public facilities). Conclusions: these results indicate that older adults with higher income or being married have longer telomeres when other sociodemographics, physical diseases, mental status and neighbourhood experience are adjusted.
Marital Quality, Health, and Aging: Gender Equity?
The Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, 2005
Recent research shows that poor marital quality adversely affects trajectories of physical health over time and that these adverse effects are similar for men and women. These studies test the possibility of gender differences in vulnerability to poor marital quality, but they fail to take into account possible gender differences in exposure to poor marital quality. We present longitudinal evidence to show that although the impact of marital quality on physical health trajectories may be similar for married men and women, generally lower levels of marital quality experienced by women may translate into a sustained disadvantage for the health of married women over the life course. These findings frame the call for renewed theoretical work on gender and marriage that takes into account both gender similarity in response to marital quality as well as gender differences in the experience of marriage over the life course.
Relationship characteristics of couples married thirty years or more: A four-sample replication
Lifestyles, 1984
A secondary analysis of four samples from earlier studies was used to test two hypotheses concerning long-term marriages. First, it was hypothesized that couples from marriages of 30 years or more duration would be characterized by higher levels of relationship quality, with the overall pattern between duration of marriage and relationship quality being curvilinear; across four samples of husbands and wives, only weak support was found for this hypothesis. A second hypothesis, that elements of intrinsic communication including positive regard, empathy, and congruence would be less important for couples from older marriages, received no support. Thus, it appears that relatively intrinsic components of the marital relationship are just as important currently for older couples as they are for younger couples, in spite of popular opinion to the contrary. Rice (1983: 7-9) has echoed the Maces' observations {Mace, 1972; Mace & Mace, 1974), that marriages have become more intrinsic than in the past, with greater emphasis on love, open communication, and companionship. In recent research (Wampler and Powell, 1982), the latter concepts have been approximated more formally by the concepts of positive regard, congruence, and empathy (Barrett-Lennard, 1962). If Rice and the Maces are correct in their assumption that older marriages are less intrinsic, then we would expect that relatively intrinsic variables such as regard, congruence, and empathy would be weaker predictors of overall marital satisfaction among older marriages as compared to marriages contracted more recently. At the same time, research (Anderson et al., 1983) often has found a curvilinear relationship between marital quality and stage in the family life cycle with the very youngest and the very oldest couples reporting higher marital quality. In most cases, such research has used only marital adjustment as the dependent variable without evaluating the effect of duration of marriage upon more specific aspects of marital communication such as regard, congruence, and empathy. Therefore, The preparation of this paper was supported in part by the Kansas Agricultural Experiment Station, Contribution No. 84-516-J.
Marital history, health and mortality among older men and women in England and Wales
BMC Public Health, 2010
Background: Health benefits of marriage have long been recognised and extensively studied but previous research has yielded inconsistent results for older people, particularly older women. At older ages accumulated benefits or disadvantages of past marital experience, as well as current marital status, may be relevant, but fewer studies have considered effects of marital history. Possible effects of parity, and the extent to which these may contribute to marital status differentials in health, have also been rarely considered. Methods: We use data from the Office for National Statistics Longitudinal Study, a large record linkage study of 1% of the population of England & Wales, to analyse associations between marital history 1971-1991 and subsequent selfreported limiting long-term illness and mortality in a cohort of some 75,000 men and women aged 60-79 in 1991. We investigate whether prior marital status and time in current marital status influenced risks of mortality or long term illness using Poisson regression to analyse mortality differentials 1991-2001 and logistic regression to analyse differences in proportions reporting limiting long-term illness in 1991 and 2001. Co-variates included indicators of socio-economic status at two or three points of the adult life course and, for women, number of children borne (parity). Results: Relative to men in long-term first marriages, never-married men, widowers with varying durations of widowerhood, men divorced for between 10 and twenty years, and men in long-term remarriages had raised mortality 1991-2001. Men in long-term remarriages and those divorced or widowed since 1971 had higher odds of long-term illness in 1991; in 2001 the long-term remarried were the only group with significantly raised odds of longterm illness. Among women, the long-term remarried also had higher odds of reporting long-term illness in 1991 and in 2001 and those remarried and previously divorced had raised odds of long-term illness and raised mortality 1991-2001; this latter effect was not significant in models including parity. All widows had raised mortality 1991-2001 but associations between widowhood of varying durations and long-term illness in 1991 or 2001 were not significant once socio-economic status was controlled. Some groups of divorced women had higher mortality risks 1991-2001 and raised odds of long-term illness in 1991. Results for never-married women showed a divergence between associations with mortality and with long-term illness. In models controlling for socio-economic status, mortality risk was raised but the association with 1991 long-term illness was not significant and in 2001 never-married women had lower odds of reporting long-term illness than women in long-term first marriages. Formally taking account of selective survival in the 20 years prior to entry to the study population had minor effects on results. Conclusions: Results were consistent with previous studies in showing that the relationship between marital experience and later life health and mortality is considerably modified by socio-economic factors, and additionally showed that taking women's parity into account further moderated associations. Considering marital history rather than simply current marital status provided some insights into differentials between, for example, remarried people according to prior marital status and time remarried, but these groups were relatively small and there were some disadvantages of the approach in terms of loss of statistical power. Consideration of past histories is likely to be more important for later born cohorts whose partnership experiences have been less stable and more heterogeneous.
Marital Quality and Health in Middle and Later Adulthood: Dyadic Associations
The journals of gerontology. Series B, Psychological sciences and social sciences, 2015
We investigated associations between positive marital quality and health among married persons aged 50 or older and their spouses. Prior research using data from married individuals has yielded inconsistent findings regarding the association between positive marital quality and global health outcomes. The present study involved married couples to examine how spouses' positive marital quality affect their own and each…
How Does the Age Gap between Partners Effect the Women’s Longevity
Journal of Natural Sciences Research, 2014
This study is done in the Koplik city population.Kopliku is a small city,in the north of Albania.It is build a database for 19200 inhabitants of the Kopliku Municipality,where it is included the year of birth,year of marriage and the year of death.From this database are taken datas for 764 couples,who are married since 1870-2012 and all the women are dead.From these datas, by using linear regression methods,it is studied the effect of age gap between partners,on marriage time in the longevity of women.The mean age at marriage for men in these couples is 26.1 years old,and for women is 19.5 years old.The spousal age gap on marriage time for 764 couples is = 6.6 and the average life expectancy is =67.41.In general, for all couples who are taken into consideration,men in time of their marriage,are older,than their wives,so the opposite case,how a younger man influence the woman's longevity can not be studied,because such marriages in Koplik city,don't exist.The equation of linear regression,that shows functional connection between the age gap of partners and women's longevity is: Ŷί = 62.281-0,1287 Xί .These parametres are connected with each-other with a regression percentage about 0.22 %,which is not significative.This study concludes than being married with older husbant,for women has no effect in their longevity,otherwise for men, being older than their wives,has positive influence in their longevity and has increased the longevity.
Baseline biopsychosocial determinants of telomere length and 6-year attrition rate
Psychoneuroendocrinology, 2016
Background: Short leukocyte telomere length (TL) and accelerated telomere attrition have been associated with various deleterious health outcomes, although their determinants have not been explored collectively in a large-scale study. Material and methods: Leukocyte TL was measured (baseline N = 2936; 6-year follow-up N = 1860) in participants (18-65 years) from the NESDA study. Baseline determinants of TL included sociodemographics, lifestyle, chronic diseases, psychosocial stressors, and metabolic and physiological stress markers. Multivariate linear regression models were used to examine the associations between these determinants and (1) baseline TL, and (2) 6-year TL change. Multinomial logistic regression analyses were used to examine the predictors of telomere attrition and lengthening, as compared to stable TL. Results: Short baseline TL was associated with older age, male sex, non-European ethnicity, cigarette smoking, recent life events, and higher triglycerides, glucose and pre-ejection period (R 2 = 11.3%). The 6year telomere attrition was inversely associated with baseline TL (R 2 = 51.6%); also older age, long sleep, not having a partner, high childhood trauma index, and gastrointestinal disease were associated with 6year TL attrition (additional R 2 = 3.7%). Telomere attrition seemed to have slightly more predictors than lengthening. Conclusions: Sociodemographic, lifestyle, psychosocial stress and metabolic and physiological stress factors are cross-sectionally linked with TL. Telomere attrition over six years was strongly associated with baseline TL, suggesting an internal homeostatic influence. Modulation of the identified determinants may become target of future studies to promote telomere maintenance and healthy aging.