Memory researcher Fabricio Ballarini says that those who live as a couple end up using each other's brains to save part of their memories and that when that person disappears, so does part of the other half. This partial fusion of people who live together for decades, in addition to affecting memories or customs, has effects on bodies. Recently, the magazine of the American Heart Association published A study in which data was collected from more than 30,000 couples around the world, which concluded that between 20 and 50% of couples shared hypertension.
In these heterosexual couples, who on average were between 50 and 75 years old, hypertension affected both men and women in 37.9% of cases in the USA, 47.1% in England, 20.8% in % in China and 19.8% in India. The influence on the wife's health was greater in countries where hypertension is less common. Compared with women married to men with healthy blood pressure, American and English women who lived with a hypertensive man were 9% more likely to have hypertension; the Indians, 19% more; and the Chinese, 26%. The percentages in each country were similar in the case of husbands.
The authors state that their results show that couple interventions can be useful against hypertension, both in tests to detect it and in the application of lifestyle changes that help reduce it, increasing physical activity, reducing stress or through diet. All these changes are more difficult to introduce and maintain if the people who live together do not adopt them at the same time.
Hypertension is not the only ailment that couples often share. In a job conducted by the universities of Tohoku (Japan) and Groningen (Netherlands), in which data from more than 5,000 Japanese couples and more than 28,000 Dutch couples were used, it was found that it is common for couples to have similar blood pressure or the same levels cholesterol and also shared diseases such as diabetes. In another study, published in the B.M.J., it was observed that the companions of people with certain non-communicable diseases had a higher risk of suffering from them. For asthma, depression and gastric ulcer, the risk increased by at least 70%.
A 'match' in habits and even genetics
All this happens, on the one hand, because couples share habits such as exercising or consuming alcohol or tobacco, and have a similar body mass index or abdominal circumference. But in addition, people usually pair up with people who are similar to them, mainly in aspects such as educational or economic level and social environment, but also from a genetic point of view. A study published in PNAS In 2013, it detected that couples have greater genetic similarity than two people chosen at random, although the effect of this agreement only reaches, at most, a third of what they have in terms of educational level. Although the mechanisms that lead to this selection of a similar partner are not well understood, it seems that the familiarity of those who look like us is attractive, and that may explain, in part, that when two people live together for a long time they end up united in Health and illness.
Over time, physical synchronization is joined by psychological rhythm that reinforces the influence on the partner's health. A study led by Shannon Mejía, a couples health specialist at the University of Illinois (USA), concluded that beliefs about aging are contagious and have effects on the health of the cohabitant. The negative perception about the possibility of maintaining an active life can become a self-fulfilling prophecy if you stop doing sports because you believe you are too old, and the same happens with the belief that aging is something inevitable about which there is no you can act. For Mejía, “the knowledge of couples, including their norms, rituals and beliefs [construidas a lo largo de décadas de convivencia] “can assist gerontologists in their support of successful joint aging of couples.”
Medical appointments as a couple
Gonzalo Grandes, head of the Primary Care Research Unit of Bizkaia, explains that “the concept of family medicine arises from the realization that couples and their children have similarities. With that basis, we should act with the family nucleus as a target, but in practice we continue to use individualized medicine, with a clinical history that is not connected with that of the rest of the family, which would provide a lot of information for the treatment.” For Grandes, this family vision is useful to face problems such as childhood obesity, which requires work on nutrition and physical activity that depends on the parents or grandparents who take care of the children. “The idea that we have to structure the socio-health intervention, at the family level and at the level of the entire community, to be effective in promoting health, is something accepted in theory, but that we have to work to implement because it is very complex”, concludes the specialist.
Isabel Egocheaga, head of the Cardiovascular Area of the Spanish Society of General and Family Physicians (SEMG), states that, although in hospital medicine appointments are not usually given for couples, in family medicine they are. “In older couples it does happen, but not in younger couples,” she points out. “Many times we do reviews at the same time and there are patients who take sintrom [un medicamento para prevenir los coágulos] and they come together to do everything at once,” he exemplifies. Like the authors of the article published by the American Heart Association, Egocheaga believes that measures to control tension, such as reducing salt consumption or exercising, are much more likely to be successful if the couple does them together.
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