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Show Husband and Wife Often Have Same Life Span Sentimentalists believe that husbands hus-bands and wives get to look alike. And some do. But only the most romantic ro-mantic sentimentalists suspected that man and wife tend to die of the same non-infectious diseases. Nevertheless, Nev-ertheless, this startling suggestion was sprung recently in the formal "Proceedings of the National Academy Acad-emy of Sciences," by Statistician Antonio Ciocco of the U. S. Public Health Service. Laboriously Dr. Ciocco examined the death certificates ol 2,571 couples who died non-accidentally in Washington Wash-ington county, Md., during the years 1898 to 1938. His findings: Husband and wife frequently have the same life span. To explain this fact. Dr. Ciocco was driven to "vague but understandable terms." Marriage, said he, brings "pairings ... of individuals having a similar degree of vitality or resistance to fatal pathological processes." And they both live in the same environment. environ-ment. "There is a tendency for marital partners to die from the same cause when one of the mates dies from either tuberculosis, influenza and pneumonia, cancer or heart diseases." dis-eases." If one partner suffers from rheumatic rheu-matic heart disease (which doctors suspect is ir tedious), the other might conceiv jly catch it. But) most other forms of heart trouble are organic, or-ganic, non-infectious. As far as doctors doc-tors know, so is cancer. Why husbands hus-bands and wives should suffer these diseases together is a great mystery. Dr. Ciocco, who as a statistician is no sentimentalist, finds the mystery "immediately discouraging." |
