Spouses of Veterans with PTSD at High Risk for Heart Problems

No big surprise to the mates of veterans. I've been on blood pressure medicine for ten years. It is stressful even when they are healing and doing better. Read the book I wrote about living with it and you'll understand why this is not news to thousands of families all over the country in different generations. If it hit me this hard knowing what I know, think about how hard it is on family members when they don't understand it.

Spouses of Veterans with PTSD at High Risk for Heart Problems
American Psychological Association
by Tori DeAngelis
Posted on August 3, 2013

As if returning service members with PTSD didn’t have enough to deal with, they may be more prone than those without PTSD to the kinds of stress reactions that create heart disease and stroke, researchers reported at a convention session Friday.

But their spouses may be at the highest risk of all, according to the team, led by University of Utah graduate student Catherine Caska.

Caska shared results at a panel called “Deployment Stress and Military Families’ Health—A Focus on Health-Risk Behaviors and Physiology,” noting that the study was among the first to examine the relationship among PTSD, marital conflict and physiological reactivity to that conflict.

The research team had 32 male service members with PTSD and their female spouses, and 33 military-couple controls with no PTSD or Axis I diagnoses, fill out questionnaires gauging PTSD symptoms and marital functioning. Then, couples underwent a 10-minute lab session where they were instructed to argue about a mutually hot topic. The researchers took pre- and post-measures of participants’ blood pressure, heart-rate reactivity and emotional states such as anxiety and anger, linked in research to heart and other physical problems.
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