San Diego, CA – A new study by the University of San Diego published on April 11 claims that marriage helps to improve the survival chances of cancer patients. The reason? It’s still a mystery to researchers, but it’s a fact: The chances of surviving cancer when married are higher than when single.
The researchers took about 800,000 patients from different ethnicities that had been diagnosed with different types of cancer between 2000 and 2009 and even from 2012. Why is it important the ethnicity of the patient? Well, it has shown that it’s an important factor since the study proves that, for example, male non-Hispanic white bachelor’s experience the worst outcome. This group had a 24 percent higher mortality rate than their married counterparts.
Also, unmarried women have a high mortality rate than married women, but among men, the difference was less significant, where single non-Hispanic white women had about 17 percent more mortality rate compared to those who were married. Single Asian/Pacific Islander female experienced about 6 percent increase of cancer deaths compared to the married counterparts – might not be too much but it makes the difference.
Lead author of this study and professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at UCS’ School of Medicine Dr. Maria Elena Martinez said that “women seek out help for health concerns more frequently than men, and women tend to remind spouses to see their physicians and live a healthy lifestyle”.
The Power of Love
Unmarried adults in the United States are raising numbers, going from 10 percent in 1960 to 23 percent in 2012 among men, and 8 to 17 percent among women, where researchers say that there could be also a rise in cancer mortality.
They suggest to further working to study the relation between marriage and cancer mortality, to finally reveal the mystery of marriage and battling cancer – that is the power of love –. Also, the study found out that unmarried cancer patients who were born outside the United States have better survival rates that the ones born in there.
How Much Does Cancer Research be?
This is a really good question, since every day the technology is going forward but when it comes to cancer, it has been taking more time that we thought it would take. According to the American Institute of Cancer Research, each year about $895 billion are spent annually on cancer, making it the most “expensive” diseases in the world, being the second the heart diseases with $753 billion.
Source: The Guardian