"The life-protecting effects of marriage stand out clearly in a study recently published by a team of epidemiologists from the University of Pittsburgh and the University of California, San Francisco.  Examining six-year cardiovascular (CVD) and all-cause mortality rates for 7524 white women age 65 or older, the Pittsburgh and San Francisco analysts looked especially for those social circumstances that predicted or prevented death.  To that end, they ran a series of statistical analyses correlating mortality rates with marital status and with Social Network scores derived from a survey inventory of family and friendship relationships.  In these analyses, 'both higher social network scores and marriage at study baseline were potent predictors of lower total and CVD mortality across follow-up.'  Underscoring the strength of the linkage between favorable social circumstances and lower mortality rates, the researchers stress that 'these benefits were largely independent of demographic variables, pre-existing disease, and other psychosocial measures.'"

(Source: "Long-Lived Women," New Research, Volume 17, Number 11; November 2003, a Howard Center abstract of Thomas Rutledge et al., "Social Networks and Marital Status Predict Mortality in Older Women: Prospective Evidence from the Study of Osteoporotic Fractures," Psychosomatic Medicine 65 [2003]: 688-694.)

"Religious faith and the power of prayer gives people a sense of confidence, hope, optimism and sense of control over ailments and other issues in life, according to a new University of Michigan study of patients undergoing open-heart surgery.

...Researchers measured the patients for their prayer coping and religiosity, cardiac status, general health and mental health, their level of depression, social support and socio-demographic factors.

They found a strong link between religiosity and the ability to feel in control, and also found a dependence of believers on the spiritual support of a higher power in their regular life."

(Source: "Researchers: Religious faith shortens hospital stays, aids recovery," University of Michigan, October 27, 2004; http://www.umich.edu/news/index.html?Releases/2004/Oct04/r102704b .)

Already worried about how to provide health benefits to aging Baby Boomers, America's policymakers may need to look closely at a new study out of Harvard Medical School.  This study shows that elderly patients without a spouse end up in lower quality hospitals and then require hospital care much longer than peers who have a spouse.

By assessing Medicare records for over 609,000 persons, the Harvard scholars establish that having a spouse actually affects medical care for the elderly in two ways.  First, compared to the unmarried, "the married consistently use higher quality hospitals," perhaps because "the married ... have access to better information and better referral networks: better informed, they are able to make better choices about which hospitals to use and how to use them."  In other words, "marriage may provide the interpersonal resources necessary to develop and execute a better algorithm for care seeking."  The second finding of the new Harvard study underscores the way in which a spouse can reduce reliance on out-of-home care:  the Harvard scholars find that compared to peers without spouses, elderly patients with spouses "have shorter lengths of stay" in the hospital (p < .001).  The researchers document this pattern of shorter hospital stay for patients with spouses for both men and women, though the pattern was particularly pronounced for men.  "Not having a spouse at home," the authors of the new study suggest, "may impede discharge."

In this study, the researchers compared only the married and the widowed, in part because divorce and cohabitation are "currently rare among the elderly."   But the Harvard researchers see divorce and cohabitation rapidly "becoming more common" among older Americans.  Indeed, their concluding comment stresses that "as the fraction of the elderly population that is married declines, the impact of marital status on health care choices could be quite important.... Spouses, after all, are far more than just help at home: they are partners in the planning of one's life and the confrontation of adversity."