Marriage, Disease and Death

Sentimentalists believe that husbands and wives get to look alike. And some do.

But only the most romantic sentimentalists suspected that man and wife tend to die of the same noninfectious diseases.

Nevertheless, this startling suggestion was sprung last week in the formal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, by Statistician Antonio Ciocco of the U. S. Public Health Service.

Laboriously Dr. Ciocco examined the death certificates of 2,571 couples who died non-accidentally in Washington County, Md. during the years 1898 to 1938. His findings:

> Husband and wife frequently have the same life span. To explain this fact, Dr. Ciocco was driven to "vague but understandable terms." Marriage, said he, brings "pairing ... of individuals having a similar degree of vitality or resistance to fatal pathological processes." And they both live in the same environment.

> "There is a tendency for marital partners to die from the same cause when one of the mates dies from either tuberculosis, influenza and pneumonia, cancer or heart diseases."

> If one partner suffers from rheumatic heart disease (which doctors suspect is infectious), the other might conceivably catch it. But most other forms of heart trouble are organic, noninfectious. As far as doctors know, so is cancer. Why husbands & wives should suffer these diseases together is a great mystery. Dr. Ciocco, who as a statistician is no sentimentalist, finds the mystery "immediately discouraging."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.