The overall survival advantages of being married and the survival disadvantages of becoming widowed are well documented. However, the nonmortal health consequences of having or losing a spouse are less well understood. Are all spouses equally beneficial, or is a healthy spouse more salubrious than a sick one? Is there a kind of a “dose/response” relationship between spousal morbidity on the one hand and the morbidity or mortality experience of a “proband” (i.e., the individual actually being studied) on the other? Are particular types of illnesses in spouses especially hazardous for probands? Conversely, is the death of a spouse more likely to elicit certain illnesses in surviving probands than others? What is the temporal pattern of these effects? Most generally, how does the morbidity and mortality of one partner affect the subsequent morbidity and mortality of the other?

This research has four overarching hypotheses as its specific aims. For each hypothesis, we also explore whether the interspousal health effect varies in accordance with specific subhypotheses related to disease type or duration or related to socioeconomic factors. Our four specific aims are to: 

• test the hypothesis that morbidity in a spouse increases mortality risk in a proband;
• test the hypothesis that mortality of a spouse increases mortality risk in a proband;
• test the hypothesis that morbidity in a spouse increases subsequent morbidity in a proband;
• test the hypothesis that mortality of a spouse increases subsequent morbidity in a proband.

So far, work published from this project includes:

NA Christakis and PD Allison, “Mortality After the Hospitalization of a Spouse,” New England Journal of Medicine 354(7): 719–30 (February 2006)

F Elwert and NA Christakis, “Widowhood and Race,” ASR: American Sociological Review 71(1): 16–41 (February 2006)

PD Allison and NA Christakis, “Fixed Effects Methods for the Analysis of Non-Repeated Events,” Sociological Methodology 36(1): 155–72 (Summer 2006).

KZ Bambauer and NA Christakis, “The Emotional Toll of Spousal Morbidity and Mortality,” American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry (2007).