Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck
Men who are have more than one wife are far more likely to have cardiovascular disease, claims new research linking polygamy with a four-fold increase in the risk of blocked heart vessels.
Dr. Amin Daoulah, a cardiologist at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre in Saudi Arabia found that the risk and severity of heart disease increased with the number of wives, and was lowest in men who were in a monogamous marriage.
“There is evidence that married people have better overall health and longevity, but until now no study has assessed the effect of polygamy on cardiovascular health,” Dr. Daoulah explained in a statement Wednesday, adding that he and his co-authors had discovered “an association between an increasing number of wives and the severity and number of coronary blockages.”
Balancing multiple families may be bad for the heart
The cardiologist explained polygamy is practiced primarily in North and West Africa, the Middle East, and Central and Southeast Asia, and that polygamous men can have up to four wives at the same time. Those women can be in the same region, but are not usually in the same home.
According to Live Science, the Koran states that men in polygamous marriages must treat each household fairly and equitably, and Dr. Daoulah believes that the link between polygamy and the increased risk of heart disease could be due to the financial and emotional burdens of doing so.
“The need to provide and maintain separate households multiplies the financial burden and emotional expense,” he explained, noting that the “stress” of balancing “several spouses and possible several families of children is considerable” and could have an adverse impact on a person’s cardiovascular health and overall wellbeing.
“However, unmeasured confounding variables such as physical activity, level of intimacy, dietary habits, and genetic effects from interbreeding with close relatives needs to be analyzed in greater depth as they may influence the outcome,” the cardiologist continued.
Polygamous men more likely to have narrowed arteries
Dr. Daoulah, whose team presented their findings Wednesday at the Asian Pacific Society of Cardiology Congress 2015, emphasized that there is currently “only an association” between coronary heart disease and polygamy, and that “further studies are required to verify the link.”
The researchers followed 687 men who had been referred to one of five different hospitals in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to be tested for heart disease. Among the men, 68 percent had one wife, 19 percent had two, 10 percent had three, and three percent had four.
The men were an average of 59 years old, nearly half of them had a prior history of heart disease, and the majority had high blood pressure and diabetes. Those patients who were polygamous tended to be older and to live in more rural areas, the authors found. Men who practice polygamy were 4.6 times more likely to have at least one narrowed coronary artery and 2.6 times more likely to have more than one compared to monogamous ones.
“We know that long-term stress in family life increases the risk of coronary heart disease (CHD) and it would be interesting to see what effect polygamy had on wives’ CHD risk,” said Michel Komajda, a past president of the ESC who was not involved in the research. “People with psychosocial risk factors are less likely to take cardiac medications, which could be relevant in the group with prior [coronary artery bypass grafting].”
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