Marriage can deter dementia, says study

Marriage may test one’s sanity, but living into old age with a partner also lowers the risk of dementia, researchers said Wednesday.

In a study covering more than 800,000 people, they found that walking through life alone increased the chances of Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia by 40 percent.

Being widowed after extended co-habitation also took a toll, boosting the odds of mental slippage by about 20 percent.

“There were fairly well established health benefits of marriage, so we did expect there to be a higher risk in unmarried people,” said lead author Andrew Sommerlad, a psychiatrist and research fellow at University College London.

“But we were surprised by the strength of our findings,” he told AFP.

Interestingly, elderly people who had divorced were no more likely to suffer from dementia that married couples.

Across the different categories, there was also no detectable difference between men and women in the rates of mental decline.

To explore the links between marriage and dementia, Sommerlad and colleagues reviewed data from 15 earlier studies covering 812,000 people from a dozen countries.

The vast majority were from Sweden, but there were enough from other nations – including France, Germany, China, Japan, the United States and Brazil – to confirm surprisingly little variation across cultures.