The ill effects are largely due to the economic consequences, as well as the emotional distress, of divorce for women, conclude Dr. Zhenmei Zhang of Bowling Green State University in Ohio and Dr. Mark D. Hayward at the University of Texas at Austin.

Zhang and Hayward also found that while divorce didn't appear to affect men's cardiovascular health, divorced, widowed and remarried men were all more likely to die sooner of non-heart-related causes than men who had stayed married to the same person.

The health effects of marriage are well established. People who have ever been married live longer than their never-married counterparts, and are less likely to suffer from mental health problems such as depression and anxiety. Few researchers, however, have looked beyond ever-married or never-married status to study the effects of divorce on health.

To investigate, the researchers studied data on 9,434 men and women between the ages of 51 and 61 in 1992 who were interviewed every two years up until 2000, and report the findings in the Journal of Marriage and Family.

Women who had been divorced, widowed or remarried were more likely to develop heart disease during the course of the study than those who were married continuously, the researchers found. They estimated that by age 60, assuming none had died, 31 percent of remarried women, 33 percent of divorced women and 30 percent of widows would have heart disease, compared to 22 percent of women still married to the same person.

No such difference was seen for men. In fact, men who remarried were actually 19 percent less likely to develop heart disease than those who had stayed married to the same person.

Hayward and Zhang note that remarried women were more likely to have heart disease than continuously married women, although their financial circumstances were not substantially worse. More study is needed to understand why, they conclude.

SOURCE: Journal of Marriage and Family, August 2006.