Do bad relationships increase the risk of heart disease, or is the root of both problems alcoholism?
“Adverse close relationships may increase the risk of heart disease.”
So found researchers in a study of 9,011 British civil servants, most of whom were married. Those judged to have the worst relationships were 34% more likely to have serious heart trouble during 12 years of follow-up than those having good relationships with partners, close relatives and friends. The study, reported in the Archives of Internal Medicine, concluded that “the quality of the relationship matters.” The study follows several others linking health problems with being single and having few close relationships.
Correlation, however, is not causation. There may be a reason that explains both poor health and a high degree of conflict: levels of alcoholism are higher among unhappily married and divorced people than happily married ones.
While alcoholism afflicts about 10% of the overall U.S. population, the odds that one or the other in a divorce–almost by definition, a marriage in which the relationship wasn’t good–runs nearly 40%. The likelihood of alcoholism in an individual who has been married and divorced four times is roughly 85%. We could argue that such discord causes alcoholism, but since the typical recovering addict informs us he or she triggered alcoholism during the first drinking episode–average age 13–it would appear that alcoholism is more likely the cause of disharmony.
A number of the 350 or so diseases and disorders caused or exacerbated by alcoholism involve the cardiovascular system, including hypertension, irregular heartbeat, disease of the heart muscle and myocardial infarction, or heart attack. As James R. Milam, Ph.D., wrote in the foreword to Toby Rice Drew’s The 350 Secondary Diseases/Disorders to Alcoholism, “Alcoholism very often is the one factor that pushes a ‘tendency’ to have the disease over the edge into a full-blown manifestation.”
As is all-too-common, even the so-called experts don’t even suspect alcoholism when it should be number one on the list (a defect that Alcoholism Myths and Realities: Removing the Stigma of Society’s Most Destructive Diseaseis designed to correct). The correct statement is more likely, “Alcoholism causes conflict in relationships and also contributes to numerous health challenges, including heart disease.” By treating the underlying cause, both issues can be mitigated, along with countless other ones that are secondary to the primary diagnosis of alcoholism