Spousal Correlations for Lifestyle Factors and Selected Diseases in Chinese Couples
Introduction
Whereas twin studies are appropriate for the study of genetic factors 1, 2, family studies of spouses allow evaluation of environmental factors in relation to disease. Spouses usually are not genetically related, but share a common living environment; therefore, concordance for some diseases between a woman and her husband reflects, to a great extent, the influence of environmental factors. Because they are living together, marital partners are more likely to adopt one another's behavioral habits. Some of these, such as smoking and alcohol drinking, are known to be risk factors for some diseases 3, 4, 5, whereas others, such as healthy dietary patterns and regular physical activity, may have a protective effect 6, 7.
Previous studies suggested a spousal aggregation of risk factors for coronary heart disease 8, 9, 10, 11, hypertension (12), asthma, depression, hyperlipidemia, peptic ulcer (13), depressive and anxiety symptoms (14), inflammatory bowel disease (15), and cancer 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21. Likewise, an intervention program focusing on coronary heart disease risk factors in men found a spin-off beneficial effect in risk-factor levels of wives for cigarette smoking, blood pressure, and serum cholesterol level (22).
However, findings from the literature regarding spousal aggregation of lifestyle factors and diseases are inconsistent, which may be caused by several factors. Most previous studies had relatively small sample sizes 14, 15, 23, 24, 25, 26; spouses were identified and linked based on common residence, family name, or other criteria 11, 12, 13, 18, 19, 20, 21, 24; or disease histories of spouses were collected by interviewing their adult offspring (16). Also, most previous studies were of Caucasians living in the United States or Europe, whereas only a few studies were conducted in Asian populations 16, 21.
The purpose of our study is to investigate spousal associations of selected lifestyle characteristics (smoking, alcohol and tea drinking, ginseng intake, and regular exercise) and common medical conditions (respiratory, cardiovascular, digestive and metabolic diseases and cancer) in a large cohort of married couples living in Shanghai, China.
Section snippets
Methods
Married couples included in this analysis were identified through the Shanghai Women's Health Study (SWHS), an ongoing prospective cohort study of women between the ages of 40 and 70 years in urban Shanghai, China. The study was approved by institutional review boards of all participating institutions, and all participants signed a written consent. Detailed information regarding study methods has been described elsewhere (27). Briefly, of 81,170 eligible women living in seven geographically
Personal and Demographic Characteristics
The distribution of demographic characteristics among married couples is listed in Table 1. At interview, women were, on average, 2.7 years younger and had a slightly greater BMI than their husbands. Husbands were more likely than their wives to have a higher level of education and work in a professional job. Median duration of cohabitation was 23.1 years (not shown in Table 1).
Lifestyle Characteristics
Distributions of lifestyle characteristics in women and their husbands are listed in Table 2. Husbands were more
Discussion
In this cross-sectional analysis of married Chinese couples based on baseline information collected in the SWHS, we found significant wife–husband associations for selected lifestyle habits (smoking, alcohol drinking, tea drinking, ginseng intake, and regular exercise) and medical conditions (tuberculosis, chronic bronchitis, asthma, chronic gastritis, chronic hepatitis, ulcerative colitis, cholelithiasis, high blood pressure, coronary heart disease, and stroke). No statistically significant
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2022, Preventive MedicineCitation Excerpt :Spouses tend to exhibit similar behavior patterns, arguably due to the development of shared habits after marriage, or behavior similarity before marriage due to assortative mating (individuals choose partners who have similar characteristics to their own) (Sackett et al., 1975). According to cross-sectional studies, spouses tend to share similar lifestyles or health-related behaviors such as smoking (Di Castelnuovo et al., 2009; Meyler et al., 2007; Christakis and Fowler, 2007), alcohol intake (Reynolds et al., 2006; Rosenquist et al., 2010; Meiklejohn et al., 2012), physical activity (Wilson, 2002; Jurj et al., 2006) and dietary patterns (Brummett et al., 2008; Pachucki et al., 2011), but this study design made it difficult to measure the impact of the development of shared habits (apart from assortative mating) after marriage. Several longitudinal studies investigated whether an individual's behavior change was influenced by changes in their spouse's behavior (Jackson et al., 2015; Falba and Sindelar, 2008; Franks et al., 2002).
Spousal similarities in cardiometabolic risk factors: A cross-sectional comparison between Dutch and Japanese data from two large biobank studies
2021, AtherosclerosisCitation Excerpt :However, relatively small sample sizes in many previous studies may have led to insufficient statistical power in identifying moderate spousal similarities for some risk factors. Although some studies had large sample sizes [22,23], they assessed single populations, and none of them compared European and Asian populations. Therefore, we aimed to quantify and compare the spousal similarities of multiple cardiometabolic risk factors in European and Asian populations from the large-scale Lifelines (Netherlands) and Tohoku Medical Megabank Organization (ToMMo) (Japan) cohorts, collectively including over 30,000 pairs.
This study was supported by research grants no. RO1 CA70867 and RO1 CA82729 from the National Institutes of Health.