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. 2025 Jul:107:8-12.
doi: 10.1016/j.annepidem.2025.05.004. Epub 2025 May 14.

Within-partner concordance of hypertension and overweight/obesity among sexual minority couples

Samuel C O Opara  1 , Caitlin A Moran  2 , Shivani A Patel  3 , Anandi N Sheth  2 , Sophia A Hussen  4 , Jithin Sam Varghese  3
Affiliations

Within-partner concordance of hypertension and overweight/obesity among sexual minority couples

Samuel C O Opara et al. Ann Epidemiol. 2025 Jul.

Abstract

Purpose: The role of partners on an individual's cardiometabolic risk status in same-sex relationships is underexplored to date, despite significant health disparities impacting sexual minority individuals. This study investigated cardiometabolic risk concordance in same-sex older adult couples in the United States.

Methods: We conducted a pooled analysis of seven study waves of the University of Michigan Health and Retirement Survey (2006-2019) and estimated concordance of hypertension and overweight/obesity among same-sex couples.

Results: Among 81 same-sex couples, we observed high concordance of hypertension and overweight/obesity among sexual minority male couples (39 couples, hypertension: 72.4 %, overweight/obesity: 64.2 %) and sexual minority female couples (42 couples, hypertension: 61.0 %, overweight/obesity: 35.6 %).

Conclusions: Our findings signify a need for longitudinal studies among same-sex couples to better characterize mechanisms of influence on partners' cardiometabolic health, as well as a potential role for couple-level interventions targeting cardiometabolic risk.

Keywords: Cardiometabolic; Cardiovascular disease; Couple concordance; LGBTQ+; Sexual minority.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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