According to a new study, women who has gone through divorce once, or men who have gone through divorce at least twice, are at a higher risk of heart attack then the women and men who remained married.

Researchers are from the Duke University.

For the study researchers have analyzed 15,000 adults aged 45 to 80 at the start of the study. These people have been married at least once and they have studies on them from 18 years from 1992 to 2010.

During the course of time, nearly 1,211 participants suffered from heart attack and these are the people who got divorced.

The study revealed that the women who got divorced at least once is having 24 percent chances of experiencing heart attack compared to their counterparts who are remain married.

Those women who got divorced more than two times is having 77 percent chances of experiencing heart attack.

Whereas men who don’t carry the same risk as that of the women. It is seen that men who have gone divorced more than twice is at a high risk for heart attack compared to the men who remain married.

“Earlier studies have suggested that marital loss has a greater impact on the health of women than men,” said lead author of the study, Matthew Dupre, an associate professor of medicine at Duke University.

He added, “Divorce is a major stressor, and we have long known that people who are divorced suffer more health consequences, but this is one of the first studies to look at the cumulative effect of divorce over a long period. We found that it can have a lasting imprint on people’s health.

The reason of differences in men and women are not known but it is believed that women will undergo through emotional stress and economic loss much more than the divorced men.

Divorce not only causes heart attack but also leads to stress, anxiety, loss of social contacts.