In older age your partner’s health affects your health
We know there are a great variety of factors that affect the quality of our life as we age. There’s the obvious ones like exercise, diet and keeping mentally active, but a new study suggests another factor you might not have considered: the health of your spouse.
A University of Arizona study, which examined data from more than 8,000 married couples who had an average age in the early 60s, found that the physical health and cognitive functioning of your spouse can significantly affect your own quality of life. Researchers analysed participants self-reports of physical health and quality of life, as well as their scores on cognition tests measuring verbal fluency and memory recall.
“When we think about quality of life for older adults, and improving quality of life, it seems like targeting the individual is only part of the story, and our findings suggests that for older adults, a larger part of individual wellbeing is defined by our partner's health and cognitive functioning as well,” said University of Arizona psychologist and co-author of the paper, David Sbarra.
The results, published in the journal Psychology and Aging, show that husbands’ and wives’ quality of life appear to be equally impacted by their spouse’s physical health. However, while wives’ cognitive functioning had as much of an effect on husbands’ quality of life as his own cognitive abilities, a wife’s quality of life was not as strongly affected by her husbands’ cognition, although there was still a measurable impact
The survey also suggested that the changes in married couples’ quality of life, over time, end up paralleling each other. These findings could have implications for how to effectively address quality of life issues of older adults, especially with a rapidly ageing population.
“If you have people whose physical health is low – maybe they're suffering from an illness or unable to walk – those kind of physical health issues not only impact the individual but the person they're married to as well,” said Kyle Bourassa, a doctoral student in clinical psychology and the paper's lead author.
“The population of aging adults is going up drastically, and as we have more and more people who are living longer and longer it's really important to understand successful aging,” continued Bourassa.
"You could extend these findings to think about interventions targeting cognition and physical health to improve quality of life not only for the individual, but also for their partner."
More research needs to be done to determine how changes in these two areas of physical and cognitive health can change quality of life over time. But it seems the old adage is half true: a happy (and healthy) wife (and husband), makes a happy life.
Related links:
6 phrases more important than “I love you”
4 bad habits that will destroy your relationship
Why sex and intimacy diminish after 60 (and what to do about)