Study published in the scientific journal Psychosomatic Medicine . Authors demonstrate that Chronic stress that develops over decades in long-term couples does not have the same effect on men as on women: the latter is more likely to display negative physiological markers than their spouse.
This is the conclusion reached by Professor Robert-Paul Juster , of the Department of Psychiatry and Addictology at the University of Montreal, and researcher Yan-Liang Yu, of Howard University, based on data taken from the Health and Retirement Study – an American longitudinal study on health and retirement.
“Yan-Liang Yu is a sociology researcher who has long been interested in how the health and well-being of couples are mutually shaped,” says Robert-Paul Juster. He focused on several studies examining the correlation between intimate partners' lifestyles and their mental and physical health problems, but few studies have examined how couples' health synchronization manifests itself “under the skin”, that is to say on the physiological level.”
Specialist in the physiology of stress, Robert-Paul Juster therefore decided to collaborate with Yan-Liang Yu to answer this question as part of a project aimed at studying how the allostatic load of older American heterosexual partners manifests itself. The two researchers began their collaboration on allostatic load while they were postdoctoral fellows at Columbia University in New York.
The two researchers' analysis is based on national data from the Health and Retirement Study. Their project consisted of examining inter partner associations of allostatic load among 2,338 long-term American couples of different sexes (i.e. 4,676 people) over a period of four years using a dyadic approach that took into account their social and economic profiles and of their state of health, including a variety of physiological indicators.
Allostatic load was calculated from immune (C-reactive protein), metabolic (high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, total cholesterol and glycosylated hemoglobin), renal (cystatin C), cardiovascular (systolic and diastolic blood pressure, pulse) and anthropometrics (body mass index and waist circumference).
Initial data show that allostatic loads within couples were significantly correlated with each other, which the researchers believe means that couples are physiologically synchronized, perhaps for a variety of reasons such as emotional, social, and family environments. shared and mutually influenced lifestyle habits.
“However, four years later, this marital synchronization in allostatic load was more notable in women than in men, which suggests that the well-being of spouses could be more influenced by their spouse than the reverse. This situation would thus testify to the traditional gendered socialization of attention to interpersonal relationships,” reports Robert-Paul Juster.
The authors of the study specify that this increased allostatic load for women was not associated with a decrease in the quality of the relationship between the partners.
“Study reveals that older couples' physiological responses to environmental stress are not only linked simultaneously, but that associations persist after four years, suggesting long-term impacts of psychosocial context and partners' physiology. 'one on top of the other', they conclude.
(AP/Newswise)
