"In a wide-ranging new study for the journal Nature Human Behavior looking at data from nearly 15 million people, researchers from institutions in the Denmark, Taiwan, and the United States found that both members of couples in those disparate cultures often share mental health diagnoses - and that it's been that way for more than half a century."
"Building on a 2016 paper in the journal JAMA Psychiatry that looked solely at Swedish databases, a consortium of researchers hailing from Oklahoma's Laureate Institute for Brain Research, Denmark's Institute of Biological Psychiatry, and Taiwan's National Health Research Institutes, used national registries in those three countries to investigate how many couples share psychiatric diagnoses."
"Separating the data into 10-year-long generational cohorts between the 1930s to the 1990s, the researchers found a slight uptick in couples sharing diagnoses - a phenomenon known in science-speak as "spousal correlations" - with each passing decade, especially for those with substance use disorder. (It's not hard to see why: recreational drug use and its dark flip-sides, abuse and addiction, exploded during the 1960s.)"
Nearly 15 million people from Denmark, Taiwan, and the United States were examined across generational cohorts from the 1930s through the 1990s. Nine psychiatric disorders were evaluated: anorexia nervosa, anxiety, ADHD, autism, bipolar disorder, depression, OCD, schizophrenia, and substance-use disorder. Couples commonly shared psychiatric diagnoses; when one partner received a diagnosis the other was likely to receive one as well, often the same diagnosis. Spousal correlations increased modestly with each decade, with the largest rise for substance-use disorder. Some cross-country variation appeared, including higher OCD concordance among Taiwanese married couples.
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