[Comparative study of health problems between wives of alcoholics and control wives].

Abstract

This study involves an the analysis of health problems and psychosomatic disorders between wives of alcoholics and those of non-alcoholics. The subjects of the study were 122 wives of alcoholics who accompanied their husbands for outpatient alcoholism treatment at Kurihama National Hospital. For an appropriate comparison, 88 aged-matched wives of non-alcoholic husbands were asked to cooperate as controls. The subjects were given Cornell Medical Index (CMI) and our original questionnaire on their own and their husbands' health problems on their first outpatient visit. The controls were also given them during the same research period. The results are briefly summarized as follows: 1. The most obvious health problem of wives of alcoholics with an incidence significantly higher than that of wives of non-alcoholics was genital disease; 13.9% of the subjects had such diseases, in contrast to 1.1% of the controls. 2. The second health problem of the subjects which significantly exceeded that of the controls was cardiovascular disease (9.0% vs 1.1%). 3. The mean number of past illnesses of the subjects was 0.78 (SD 1.08) compared with 0.51 (SD 0.82) for the controls. 4. The rate of current illness of the subjects was 28.2% compared with 19.3% for the controls. 5. The rate of CMI Category IV (indicates "neurotic") of the subjects was 5.0% compared with 0.0% for the controls. 6. As a whole, our results were more moderate than those of previous studies, but wives of alcoholics had more current and past illness, and were more neurotic than the controls.