Heart trouble likely begins at home

Fighting with a spouse or another close family member is literally bad for the heart.

People whose primary personal relationships have a lot of negative interaction are 34 percent more likely to suffer coronary events, such as chest pain and heart attacks, scientists said in a study published yesterday in a leading medical journal.

“A person’s heart condition seems to be influenced by negative intimate relationships,” wrote Roberto De Vogli of University College London in a study published yesterday in the Archives of Internal Medicine, a journal of the American Medical Association.

Mr. De Vogli and his colleagues studied 9,000 British civil servants over a 12-year period and compared how harmonious their primary relationships were.

The elevated risk remained even after age, employment, weight, cholesterol, smoking, work stress and other characteristics were considered, they wrote.

The De Vogli study was not restricted to marriage — more than a third of the British study participants named someone other than a spouse as their primary close relationship — but it adds to the literature about how the quality of a marital relationship affects people’s health and well-being.

“Married people are generally healthier than unmarried people,” the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation said in a June report on the effects on marriage on health. But when it comes to specific physical health outcomes, “the effects of marriage remain largely unaddressed by rigorous research,” the report said.

“It makes sense that [human relationships] affect our physical health,” said Karen Blaisure, a professor in Western Michigan University’s family and consumer sciences department and a clinical member of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy.

Relationships researcher John Gottman recommends that fighting couples avoid letting their heart rates exceed 100 beats a minute, she said.

When the heart rate gets that high, “we get less blood to the brain, we can’t hear as well, we may start interpreting what the person is saying as negative even when it’s not,” she said. “The calmer we can stay, the more we have access to our decision-making” skills.

Ms. Blaisure advises couples who aren’t dealing well with conflict to seek help as quickly as possible. Like a physical ailment, she said, “it’s usually easier to treat the sooner you get in.”

The De Vogli study suggested that negative relationships affect heart health because of “cumulative ’wear and tear’ on organs and tissues.” It also noted that people tend to “mentally replay negative encounters more than they replay positive ones” and that “negative relationships activate stronger emotions” such as worrying and anxiety more than less-conflicted relationships.