Health Tips

Despite all the advances in radiation treatment and chemotherapy, one of the best aids to surviving cancer comes not from the oncology clinic but from the wedding chapel. The surprising proof of wedlock's power to improve cancer survival rates appears in a study recently published in Social Science and Medicine by epidemiologist Oystein Kravdal of the University of Oslo. With census data for the entire Norwegian population for the period 1960 through 1991, Kravdal calculates marital differentials in survival from 12 common types of cancer. His calculations reveal "a significant impact of marital status...for all 12 selected sites except uterus cancer and leukemia."

"...It is particularly the never-married who appear to have a disadvantage, but significant effects are also found for the previously married." More precisely, "the excess all-cause mortality among cancer patients...is, on the whole, more than 15% higher for never-married men, never-married women and divorced men, than for the married of the same sex. Other previously married [cancer patients, including divorced women and widowed men and women] have an excess mortality elevated by 7%."