Marriage and Its Effects on Post-Surgical Survival

Dr. Elliott Bennett-Guerrero serves as professor and vice chair for clinical research at Stony Brook Medicine, where he also leads as medical director for perioperative quality and patient safety. As a researcher, Dr. Elliott Bennett-Guerrero has published on a variety of topics, including social support and its effect on patient mortality.

In 2016, the Journal of Surgical Research published a report from Dr. Elliott Bennett-Guerrero and colleagues. The researchers had evaluated mortality data from more than 11,500 patients who underwent a variety of noncardiac surgical procedures, approximately 68 percent of whom were married at the time of the surgery. Data revealed that marriage was associated with significantly better survival rates among men, but that there was no significant difference between married and unmarried women.

Studies focused on cardiac surgeries have not shown this division by gender, although the sampled types of surgeries have differed in those cases. A 2012 study that examined marriage and mortality after cardiac surgery showed unmarried individuals were just 52 percent as likely to achieve five-year survival after such procedures versus their married cohorts, and that there was no significant difference between male and female patients.

Another study, released in the same year but focused on coronary artery bypass grafting, revealed that married patients had a chance of 15-year survival that was 250 percent higher than their unmarried counterparts. The rate was unknown for female patients (the sample size of women was too small to reach statistical significance) when researchers adjusted data to account for age.