Dementia Is Much More Common Among the Married Than the Unmarried

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/living-single/202504/dementia-is-more-common-among-the-married-than-the-unmarried

by ivewonyoung • 1 year ago

18 11 1 year ago

psychologytoday.com

treetalker• 1 year ago

I'm not the best with numbers, but the subtitle of the linked article says that "Unmarried people are at least 50% less likely to experience cognitive decline." That's a bit different than saying that the "Study shows marriage increases your odds of dementia by 50%" — both numerically and causally, no?

ZiiS3• 1 year ago

Yes the arxticle claims marriage more then doubles your odds of cognative decline. Though I guess that might actually be reduced a lot in people were that maths is eluding them, or not checking the research findings differ from the article.

dragonsky67• 1 year ago

This raises so many questions.

I'd be interested in how many people in the study from each group die off during the study... is there a larger number of people in the unmarried group dying off, thereby increasing the chance that the married group would age to the point where dementia is more likely?

The question about married people being more likely to be able to afford health care (via insurance) would seem to be a uniquely US issue... I'd be interested to see the health impact of marriage on different countries, different cultural groups etc.

Culture would seem to impact greatly on what marriage entails... many groups appear to have a strong link between marriage and cultural activities, others it allows the couple to be a self contained social group, removing the link to external socialisation.

The 50% figure seems to be pretty strong, but at least from the article it is hard to draw too many conclusions without knowing how wide the sample set of participants are.

TimJRobinson• 1 year ago

I wonder if it related to those studies showing couples have more of a shared memory, to manage tasks better. When playing memory games they tend to do much better than two strangers placed on a team.

What if this leads to less of a cognitive workout over time vs having to manage everything yourself which increases dementia risk?

Krssst• 1 year ago

Could there be a link to having children causing sleep deprivation for a few years as well as catching plenty of additional contagious diseases during infancy? (colds, flu...)

ZiiS3• 1 year ago

The research seems to mainly show single people are less likly to have someone to report their cognative decline.

zaik• 1 year ago

What part of the study design makes you think that? It doesn't seem to be based on reports.

ZiiS3• 1 year ago

"The finding that unmarried individuals in NACC were less likely to be diagnosed with dementia could be due to an ascertainment bias, with married individuals more likely to have partners who notice and report cognitive failures."

yieldcrv• 1 year ago

I agree with the flagged comment that there might be other traits people that are single or choose to be have, than those that feel driven to marriage or susceptible to the pressure of doing it

It does take a level of impressionability to agree to that kind of contract with those terms, which could already be considered a cognitive decline

Llamamoe• 1 year ago

Given the links between dementia and infectious disease and the microbiome, I wonder if the real explanation could just be that unmarried people have less exposure to infection vectors(since living with another person working elsewhere essentially doubles it), or less contact with children who get sick a lot.

jmpman• 1 year ago

I figured that married people are more likely to have STDs which are correlated with dementia.

Dementia Is Much More Common Among the Married Than the Unmarried

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