Researchers say illness heavily affects spouses

The burden of caring for spouses with mental diseases may take a heavier toll than previously thought, researchers affiliated with Penn have found.

The study of 550,000 Medicare patients showed that spouses died at a greater rate following hospitalization or death of an ill partner.

In particular, people whose spouses have mental disease are more likely to die -- both immediately after their spouses are first hospitalized and in the long term -- according to the study, conducted by Harvard sociology professor Nicholas Christakis and Penn Sociology Department Chairman Paul Allison.

The researchers also found that mental diseases are more likely to create this effect than cancer.

The largest increase in spouse mortality came soon after the first major bout of disease.

Because the study used Medicare billing data to track the patients, it did not obtain details about the individuals' lives.

But that doesn't mean researchers do not have their own ideas about the meaning of the data.

Stories like that of Nancy Kagan -- mother of Nursing professor Sarah Kagan -- help to flesh out the numerical framework built by Allison and Christakis.

"The sun is shining," Nancy Kagan says about her day, even though her husband Ralph passed away nearly two years ago after five to eight years of a steady slide into dementia.

"His mind was deteriorating, and that was the hardest part. I think that's very different from having someone who was sick but has their wits about," she said.

Nancy Kagan said she was not surprised that the study found mental illness to be especially tough to cope with for spouses.

"There you are, taking care of a body with nothing resembling the person you lived with, as I did for 50 years," she said. "You're taking care of essentially a stranger.

"There is a large ingredient of just hoping for some relief, an end to it," she said.

But Nancy Kagan eventually rebounded after her husband's death.

"My mom has turned into the person everyone knew as a teenager," Sarah Kagan said. "She's doing grad school in [political science], taking algebra for some bizarre reason, travelling -- the whole nine yards."

Both Kagans and Allison think that better support structures would help to mitigate the effects of one spouse's illness on the other.

"We tend to imagine that individuals have illnesses, [but] we rarely comprehend the extent to which people who've been together in an intimate relationship are really fused," Sarah Kagan said.

Study's findings

- An increase in spouse mortality is most common after a patient has the first major bout of a disease

- Mentally degenerative diseases are more likely than other diseases to cause spousal death

- Researchers say better support systems for families of mentally ill patients would most likely help to curb trend

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