Marital relationship factors associated with coronary heart disease

Abstract

The marital relationships of 97 male coronary patients of a regional medical center and their spouses were evaluated by three methods: behavior type, self-referencing, and marital communication. Since self-referencing was evaluated by auditing responses on the Structured Interview, modified forms of the Gough Adjective Checklist and the Thurstone Temperament Scale were used as independent measures of behavior type. The dependent variable in the multiple regression equation was a severity of disease index devised by boarded cardiologists from cineangiographic studies. The multiple regression analysis for the full model was significant at p = .05 level of significance. All other measures were significantly related to the husband's severity of disease for the subjects individually and the interactions between husband and wife's scores with the exception of behavior type measured by the Gough Adjective Checklist. Additionally, age of husband was used in the full model to control for age artifacts in the sample. Interestingly, age was not significantly associated with the severity of disease index. Thus, it was concluded that in this sample marital relationship factors as defined by the above measures were related to the severity of disease found in the husband group. Limitations of the research, other findings, and suggestions for future investigations were discussed.