Sticking together makes the world of difference in mid-life

NEW research published in the open access journal General Psychiatry has found that satisfying relationships in mid-life with partners, friends, or work colleagues are linked to a lower risk of accumulating multiple long term conditions in older age for women.

The study found that the less satisfying these relationships were, the greater the risk of multiple chronic diseases, even after adjusting for influential factors such as income, education, and health behaviours.

The research was conducted using data from the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women’s Health, which looked at factors associated with the health and wellbeing of women aged 18–23, 45–50, and 70–75 in 1996. The study drew on 13,714 participants, all of whom were aged 45-50 in 1996.

Their health and wellbeing was tracked roughly every three years via questionnaire up to 2016.

The women were asked to rank their levels of satisfaction with each of their five categories of relationships on a four-point scale, and to indicate if they developed any of 11 chronic conditions. Accumulating two or more of these conditions was defined as having multiple conditions.

The final analysis included 7,694 women, of whom 58 per cent accumulated multiple long term conditions over 20 years of monitoring. Compared with women reporting the highest level of satisfaction, those who reported the lowest were more than twice