6 Positive effects of a partner on health
1)Pain relief
A partner's touch has been found to relieve pain in women.
It is well known that people subconsciously synchronize their footsteps when they walk together or mirror a friend's posture during a conversation.
Investigators from the University of Colorado, Boulder and the University of Haifa in Israel have now discovered that when heterosexual lovers touch when the woman is in pain, couples' heart rates and respiratory patterns synchronize and the woman's pain dissipates.
These findings add to a growing body of evidence on "interpersonal synchronization," a phenomenon in which people begin to physiologically mirror those that they spend time with. "The more empathic the partner and the stronger the analgesic effect, the higher the synchronization between the two when they are touching," explains lead author Pavel Goldstein, a
postdoctoral pain researcher at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
2)Help achieve healthy goals
Two heads are better than one when it comes to taking up healthy habits. Funded by Cancer Research UK, the British Heart Foundation, and the National Institute on Aging, scientists at University College London (UCL) in the United Kingdom revealed that if you want to swap bad habits for good, then you would be more successful if your partner also makes those changes.
Among women who smoked, the researchers found that 50 percent succeeded in quitting smoking if their partner gave up at the same time, compared with 17 percent whose partners were non-smokers already, and just 8 percent whose partners smoked regularly.
"Unhealthy lifestyles are a leading cause of death from chronic disease worldwide," says study author Prof. Jane Wardle, director of Cancer Research UK's Health Behaviour Research Centre at UCL. "The key lifestyle risks are smoking, excess weight, physical inactivity, poor diet, and alcohol consumption. Swapping bad habits for good ones can reduce the risk of disease, including cancer ."
3)mprove fitness
Echoing these findings, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, MD, conducted research finding that improving your fitness could also improve the fitness of your spouse.
Couples were asked about their physical activity levels at two medical visits conducted around 6 years apart. On the first visit, if a wife met the recommended guidelines for physical activity, her husband was 70 percent more likely to also reach those targets at subsequent visits than those whose wives were less active. Conversely, when a husband met recommended activity levels, his wife was 40 percent more likely to also achieve these levels at follow-up visits.
"When it comes to physical fitness, the best peer pressure to get moving could be coming from the person who sits across from you at the breakfast table," says co-author Laura Cobb, a doctoral student at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
"There's an epidemic of people in countries who don't get enough exercise, and we should harness the power of
the couple to ensure people are getting a healthy amount of physical activity."
4)Alter microbiome
Microbial exchange with your partner can occur simply from walking on the same bathroom floor.
Researchers from the University of Waterloo in Canada found that couples who live together influence the microbiome - that is, the community of bacteria and other microbes - on each other's skin.
Commonalities between couples' skin microbiome were strong enough that computer algorithms could detect couples that cohabit with an accuracy of 86 percent.
Skin regions that were the most similar between partners were on the couples' feet. "In hindsight, it makes sense," says Prof. Josh Neufeld, of the faculty of Science in the Department of Biology at the University of Waterloo.
"You shower and walk on the same floor barefoot. This process likely serves as a form of microbial exchange with your partner, and also with your home itself."
5)mprove physical and mental health
While analyzing whether or not relationships are good for your health, David and John Gallacher, from Cardiff University in the U.K., confirmed that long-term, committed relationships are good for physical and psychological health, and that these benefits increase over time.
On average, individuals who are married live longer; women have better mental health when they are in committed relationships, while men have better physical health when in a committed relationship. The study authors say, "On balance it probably is worth making the effort."
6) Decrease risk of health conditions
Studies have shown that partners can also affect each other's risk and development of disease.
Persistent nagging from your partner could slow down diabetes progression. For example, a study by Michigan State University (MSU) in East Lansing deduced that for men who are in an unhappy marriage, the development of diabetes is slower and treatment is more successful once they are diagnosed.
The researchers said that wives who continuously regulate their husband's health behaviors and who are seen as annoying and provoking hostility and emotional distress in the husbands could explain this finding.
"The study challenges the traditional assumption that negative marital quality is always detrimental to health," says lead investigator Hui Liu, an associate professor of sociology at MSU. "It also encourages family scholars to distinguish different sources and types of marital quality. Sometimes,nagging is caring." Researchers from the University of Michigan have also determined that having an optimistic spouse predicted fewer chronic illnesses and better mobility over time.
"A growing body of research shows that the people in our social networks can have a profound influence on our health and well-being," says lead study author Eric Kim, a doctoral student in the University of Michigan's Department of Psychology. "This is the first study to show that someone else's optimism could be impacting your own health."
In other research, people who are happily wed are more than three times as likely to be alive 15 years after coronary bypass surgery as their unmarried counterparts. Married people also are less likely to have cardiovascular problems than individuals who are single, divorced, or widowed.
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