Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2019 Oct;81(8):704-710.
doi: 10.1097/PSY.0000000000000647.

Marriage and Gut (Microbiome) Feelings: Tracing Novel Dyadic Pathways to Accelerated Aging

Janice K Kiecolt-Glaser  1 , Stephanie J Wilson, Annelise Madison
Affiliations

Marriage and Gut (Microbiome) Feelings: Tracing Novel Dyadic Pathways to Accelerated Aging

Janice K Kiecolt-Glaser et al. Psychosom Med. 2019 Oct.

Abstract

Within a couple, partners influence each other's mental and physical health. This review focuses on how couples' relationships, the partners' individual and joint vulnerabilities, and their health behaviors influence health through changes in the gut microbiota, metabolism, and immune function. Couples' shared stressors and emotions and their intertwined lifestyles and routines serve to promote common disease risks in part through parallel changes in their gut microbiotas. Marital discord, stress, and depression have strong bidirectional links, fueling one another. Chronic marital stress and depression can elevate the risk for obesity, metabolic syndrome, and cardiovascular disease by altering resting energy expenditure, insulin production, and triglyceride responses after unhealthy meals. During stressful times, health behaviors typically suffer-and sleep disturbances, poor diets, and sedentary behavior all influence these metabolic pathways while also promoting gut dysbiosis. Dysbiosis increases intestinal permeability (gut leakiness), providing a mechanistic pathway from marital distress and depression to heightened inflammation and accelerated aging. Age-related changes in the gut microbiota's composition and gut leakiness foster immunosenescence, as well as the progression of inflamm-aging; these age-related risks may be altered by stress and depression, diet, sleep, exercise habits, and developmental shifts in emotion regulation strategies. Consideration of the strong mutual influences that partners have on each other's mood and health behaviors, as well as the biological pathways that underlie these influences, provides a new way to view marriage's health implications.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

Conflicts of Interest: All authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Conceptual model summarizing the paths by which the marital relationship may influence health and aging via the gut. Often interrelated, both partners’ characteristics—e.g., their own prior mental and physical health, personality traits, and lifestyles—affect the relationship. In turn, partners’ marital interactions, the stressors they face together and individually, their health behaviors, as well as their physical contact and living environment have physiological consequences. Namely, they may augment intestinal permeability, as well as metabolic, immune, and neuroendocrine function directly, or indirectly, in part through changes in intestinal microbial communities. Thereafter, these mutually reinforcing physiological cascades shape partners’ health status and set the pace of aging. Ultimately, changes in health and biological aging feed back to affect life with one’s partner.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

See all "Cited by" articles

References

    1. Tang K, Zhang W. Transcriptional similarity in couples reveals the impact of shared environment and lifestyle on gene regulation through modified cytosines. PeerJ 2016;4:e2123. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Carr EJ, Dooley J, Garcia-Perez JE, Lagou V, Lee JC, Wouters C, Meyts I, Goris A, Boeckxstaens G, Linterman MA, Liston A. The cellular composition of the human immune system is shaped by age and cohabitation. Nat Immunol 2016;17:461–8. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Davillas A, Pudney S. Concordance of health states in couples: Analysis of self-reported, nurse administered and blood-based biomarker data in the uk understanding society panel. J Health Econ 2017;56:87–102. - PubMed
    1. Rothschild D, Weissbrod O, Barkan E, Kurilshikov A, Korem T, Zeevi D, Costea PI, Godneva A, Kalka IN, Bar N, Shilo S, Lador D, Vila AV, Zmora N, Pevsner-Fischer M, Israeli D, Kosower N, Malka G, Wolf BC, Avnit-Sagi T, Lotan-Pompan M, Weinberger A, Halpern Z, Carmi S, Fu J, Wijmenga C, Zhernakova A, Elinav E, Segal E. Environment dominates over host genetics in shaping human gut microbiota. Nature 2018;555:210–5. - PubMed
    1. Kiecolt-Glaser JK, Wilson SJ. Lovesick: How couples’ relationships influence health. Annu Rev Clin Psychol 2017;13:421–43. - PMC - PubMed

Publication types

MeSH terms