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Marriage and gut (microbiome) feelings: Tracing novel dyadic pathways to accelerated aging
This 2019 review highlights how couples’ relationships, partners’ individual and joint vulnerabilities, and their health behaviors can influence health through changes in gut microbiota, metabolism, and immune function. When couples share stressors and emotions in their commonly intertwined lives, these partners may be at risk of common disease partly due to parallel alterations in their gut microbiota. Marital discord, stress, and depression can all fuel one another. Additionally, chronic marital stress and depression can make partners susceptible to obesity, metabolic syndrome, and cardiovascular disease through changes in resting energy expenditure, insulin production, and triglyceride responses after unhealthy meals. During stressful periods, one can become less active, develop sleeping problems, and adopt poor eating habits, all of which can promote gut dysbiosis (imbalance of the bacterial community) and affect metabolic pathways. This loss of balance in bacterial communities can increase intestinal permeability (gut leakiness) and can potentially be involved in the increase in inflammation and acceleration of aging. Age-related changes in the gut microbiota’s composition and gut leakiness can facilitate age-related immune dysfunction and inflammation. The risk of developing these age-related conditions may be influenced by depression, diet, sleep, exercise habits, and emotion control strategies. Since partners can affect each other’s moods and behaviors, this article presents a novel way of viewing the health implications of marriage. [NPID: marriage, married, couples, partners, relationships, health, gut, GI, gastrointestinal, mood, immune system, immunity, gut microbiota, gut health, gut bacteria, depression, lifestyle, aging, stress, diet, exercise, sleep]
Year: 2021
