FRIDAY, Sept. 20, 2002 (HealthDayNews) -- Married couples may share more than the same bed and an occasional argument.
Spouses of people with asthma, depression and peptic ulcer disease are 70 percent more likely to suffer from the same disease, says a new study appearing in tomorrow's British Medical Journal.
Spouses also had a greater chance of suffering from high blood pressure and hyperlipidemia (excess cholesterol in the blood) if their partners had the condition, though the risk here was less than 70 percent.
The implication is that some environmental cause or shared behavior is behind the condition.
"There's this assumption that any correlation between people has to be genetic, and this is showing that there's a lot of environmental and behavioral risk factors for specific diseases that aren't genetic," says Sven Wilson, assistant professor of public policy at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. "This study points to where we want to look for potential risk factors."
"Spouses tend not to be genetically related, so they offer a good opportunity to examine shared risks and the environment," adds the study's lead author, Dr. Julia Hippisley Cox, a senior lecturer in general practice in the School of Community Health Sciences at the University of Nottingham in the U.K.
Scientists already knew that spouses of people with hypertension were at an increased risk for that disease, but some of the other findings in this sample of 8,386 married couples were more of a surprise. (All the results were adjusted for age, obesity and smoking status in both partners.)
And there may, in fact, be different explanations for why different diseases are prevalent in couples.
In the case of hypertension and hyperlipidemia, for instance, shared diet or exercise patterns may play a role. Asthma could be explained by allergens found in the home.
"When you have two adults in a home who have allergies and asthma, certainly environment is very important in triggering any kind of allergic reactions," says Dr. Clifford Bassett, an allergist with Long Island College Hospital in Brooklyn. "Forty percent of children throughout the industrial world have some form of allergy, and we think a lot of it has to do not only with parents and genetics but also with environment."
The researchers did not find a concordance for diabetes, a somewhat surprising result. But there may be an explanation for this as well.
"Potential risk factors such as obesity, smoking, and stress all cause a multitude of different diseases, so they could be important in the context of the marriage and the household, even if they don't lead to the same disease," says Wilson, whose article appearing in the September issue of Social Science and Medicine shows a strong association between the health of spouses.
"One person could get heart disease and the other lung cancer both related to an environmental cause like smoking," he adds. Similarly, one partner may develop diabetes because he or she is obese while the other partner, also overweight, may develop heart disease.
"This shows how much room there is to focus on environmental factors," Wilson adds.
The findings may also have implications for public health: Should couples and families be screened for the same diseases? "The case for screening still needs to be established, but it may turn out that it is appropriate to screen spouses for particular diseases," Cox says.
Wilson thinks this is the trend of the future. "We need to move away from just treating individuals and we need to treat families," he says. "I think studies like this will point us more in the direction of treating families rather than individuals, because so much of what we can affect about our health takes place in the context of the family situation we're in. Every married couple knows that."
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