(Mirror Daily, United States) – When it comes to heart surgery, recovery is not something that depends only on skilled surgeons and caring nurses. According to a new study published in the journal American Medical Association, it also has to do with martial happiness.
Researchers discovered that happily married heart patients have a much speedier recovery than their single or divorced counterparts. Some interesting conclusions resulted when a team of researchers from the University of Michigan analyzed data collected from 1,576 cases of adults over the age of 50 who had undergone cardiac operation.
It turns out that married patients had a much smoother post-surgery recovery than the singles, widowed or divorced ones. According to the study, those unmarried had a 40 percent higher risk of dying in post-op – or at least developing a new disability – in the next two years following the surgery.
Study co-author Mark Neuman stated that even though it was well established that survival chances significantly increased among married persons, the team could not say for sure what caused this relation between marital status and its postoperative function. But understanding the correlation might offer insight into identifying which patients may need additional support for improving functional recovery.
Dr. Ashish Shah, chief of the heart transplantation at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, concurred with the findings from this study, saying they cement previous results from studies that had already confirmed married couples tend to fare much better in surgery and post-op than unmarried patients.
Dr. Shah added that beyond the end result of this correlation between happy couples and uncomplicated post-surgery recovery rates, researchers are curious about the underlying reasons. Once these are identified, medical staff could ensure that adequate support and resources will be allocated so post-op recovery rates will improve for all types of patients.
It’s a long-standing belief that people who don’t go through heart surgery alone have a tendency to do better. Most heart surgeons agree that sometimes operations are unnecessarily complication due to emotional stressors. Back in the day, heart surgeons were taught that a successful operation will lead to an easy recovery, even though that was not always the case.
Nowadays, surgeons’ focus is beyond the target of performing a good surgery; they also care about what happens with the patient outside the hospital. Caring for the patient who underwent heart surgery also involves making sure they have someone at home capable of looking after them.
Image Source: Huffington Post
Melissa Gansler
