Marital quality and health: A meta-analytic review.

This meta-analysis reviewed 126 published empirical articles over the past 50 years describing associations between marital relationship quality and physical health in more than 72,000 individuals. Health outcomes included clinical endpoints (objective assessments of function, disease severity, and mortality; subjective health assessments) and surrogate endpoints (biological markers that substitute for clinical endpoints, such as blood pressure). Biological mediators included cardiovascular reactivity and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis activity. Greater marital quality was related to better health, with mean effect sizes from r = .07 to .21, including lower risk of mortality (r = .11) and lower…

• UD
  U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs
• WT
  William T. Grant Foundation
• NI
  National Institutes of Health

  Awards: T32 MH015750 and R01 HL114097, F31 AG034718, R21 AG032494