Mormons and Muslims Beware: Polygamy QUADRUPLES Heart Disease Risk

You may like having a lot of wives---and all together, not one after another who gets divorced---but your heart can't take it, surprisingly.

Polygamy, which is the name for having lots of these wives, might make your heart caper and fly for a while, but would soon give you a cardiac arrest after some time.

In fact, polygamy exposes you to the risk of heart disease by four times compared to a man with just one wife, says a new study presented Wednesday at the Asian Pacific Society of Cardiology Congress, a meeting of cardiologists in Abu Dhabi, according to newsweek.

In fact, the "risk and severity of heart disease increased with the number of wives," according to medindia.

Says Dr. Amin Daoulah, a cardiologist at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Center in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, no study has recorded the impact of polygamy on cardiovascular health. Most polygamous men have four concurrent wives living in the same or different regions, yet they do not live in the same house. It is a common practice in North and West Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia and Southeast Asia.

The probe on the relationship between the seriousness of coronary artery disease (CAD) and number of wives was examined by the prospective multi-center observational study. It included some patients who had been referred for coronary angiography to five hospitals in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

The study threw up some interesting statistics, according to medindia:

"The 687 married men in the study had an average age of 59 years and 56 percent had diabetes, 57 percent had hypertension and 45 percent had a past history of CAD. Around two-thirds of the men had one wife (68 percent) while 19 percent had 2 wives, 10 percent had 3 wives and 3 percent had 4 wives. There were significant baseline differences according to the number of wives. Men with more than 1 wife were more likely to be older, live in a rural area, have a higher income and have a history of coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG)."

Dr Daoulah finds that the reason for the heart disease is simple---their income is not adequate. They need more than one source of income, and may have to shoulder additional employment along with the pressure of daily transport to urban areas for higher paid work. Maintaining separate households increases the economic and emotional pressures on the men.

The researchers also identified some association between the number of wives and CAD, Left main disease (LMD) and Multivessle disease (MVD). The more the number of wives, the greater the risk.

"After adjusting for baseline differences, the researchers showed that men who practiced polygamy had a 4.6-fold increased risk of CAD, a 3.5-fold increased risk of LMD and a 2.6-fold elevated risk of MVD."

However, Dr Daoulah confirmed that "confounding variables" such as exercise, intimacy, diets and interbreeding within the family needs also to be probed deeply in order to check the impact on the results.