Psychologists at the University of Utah have recently discovered that women who are “bound” in strained and stressful marriages are very likely to start exhibiting signs of depression and high blood pressure, two of the symptoms most commonly associated with the emergence of heart diseases, diabetes, and stroke. Obesity is also a risk factor for these ladies, and they should start worrying once one or more of these signs begin to make themselves visible.

“We hypothesized that negative aspects of marriages like arguing and being angry would be associated with higher levels of metabolic syndrome. We further anticipated that this relationship would be at least partly due to depressive symptoms. In other words, those who reported experiencing more conflict, hostility and disagreement with their spouses would [get] more depressed, which in turn would be associated with a higher risk of heart diseases due to metabolic syndrome,” psychology doctoral student Nancy Henry, the first author of the new paper, explains.

The metabolic syndrome, doctors share, can be characterized by five main features, namely hypertension, high blood sugar and triglycerides levels, obesity (especially around the waistline), as well as low levels of the useful type of HDL cholesterol. In the same study, the researchers have concluded that husbands in the same marriages are very likely to feel depressed as well, but they do not exhibit the same increased risks for serious medical conditions.

“We found this was true for wives in this study, but not for husbands. The gender difference is important because heart disease is the number-one killer of women as well as men, and we are still learning a lot about how relationship factors and emotional distress are related to heart disease,” the researcher, who presented her findings in Chicago on Thursday, at the annual meeting of the American Psychosomatic Society, adds.

“The immediate implication is that if you are interested in your cardiovascular risk – and we all should be because it is the leading killer for both genders – we should be concerned about not just traditional risk factors [such as blood pressure and cholesterol], but the quality of our emotional and family lives,” psychology professor Tim Smith, the co-author of the new study, concludes.