
A new study published this week in the journal Cancer has doctors, patients, and families talking -- and asking hard questions -- about what happens in a couple when it's the wife, rather than the husband, who becomes ill.
Here's what researchers found when they followed 515 patients with cancer or multiple sclerosis over a period of five years.
• A woman is six times more likely to end up separated or divorced soon after a diagnosis of cancer or MS than a man who becomes ill with the same disease.
• In couples in which the woman fell ill, the divorce rate was more than 20 percent.
• In couples in which the man got sick, the divorce rate was just 2.9 percent.
• The older a woman was at the time she got sick, the more likely she was to end up alone.
• However, the longer a couple had been married, the less likely they were to end up divorced.
The researchers at Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, Huntsman Medical Center, and Stanford University were studying a phenomenon that has already been documented in numerous other studies... Read more








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