‘Nagging is caring’ for husbands with diabetes

Michigan State University rightOriginal Study

Posted by Andy Henion-Michigan State on May 27, 2016

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A strained marriage may actually improve the health of men with diabetes, new research shows.

Why? It may be because wives are constantly regulating their husband’s health behaviors, especially if he is in poor health or diabetic. And while this may improve the husband’s health, it can also annoy him and provoke hostility and emotional distress.

“The study challenges the traditional assumption that negative marital quality is always detrimental to health,” says Hui Liu, an associate professor of sociology at Michigan State University and lead investigator of the study. “It also encourages family scholars to distinguish different sources and types of marital quality. Sometimes, nagging is caring.”

Using data from the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project, Liu and colleagues analyzed survey results from 1,228 married respondents over five years. At the onset of the study, the respondents were 57 to 85 years old; 389 had diabetes at the end of the study.

Diabetes is the seventh leading cause of death in the United States. More than 29 million Americans had diabetes in 2012, or 9.3 percent of the population.

Liu investigated the role of marital quality in diabetes risk and management and found two major gender differences:

First, the most surprising finding was that, for men, an increase in negative marital quality lowered the risk of developing diabetes and increased the chances of managing the disease after its onset. Diabetes requires frequent monitoring that the wives could be prodding the husband to do, boosting his health but also increasing marital strain over time.

Second, for women, a good marriage was related to a lower risk of being diabetic five years later. Women may be more sensitive than men to the quality of a relationship and thus more likely to experience a health boost from a good-quality relationship, Liu says.

“Since diabetes is the fastest growing chronic condition in the United States, implementation of public policies and programs designed to promote marital quality should also reduce the risk of diabetes and promote health and longevity, especially for women at older ages,” the study says.

Coauthors from Michian State and the University of Chicago contributed to the study, which appears online in the Journals of Gerontology: Social Sciences.

Partial funding came from the National Institute on Aging, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research, which are all part of the National Institutes of Health.

Source: Michigan State University