Child Marriage and Cardiovascular Risk: An Application of the Non-laboratory Framingham Risk Score

Child marriage, defined as marriage before the age of 18 years, is a precocious transition from adolescence to adulthood, which may take a long-term toll on health.

This study aims to assess whether child marriage was associated with added risk of adverse cardiovascular outcomes in a nationally representative sample of Indian adults.

Applying the non-laboratory-based Framingham algorithm to data on 336,953 women aged 30-49 years and 49,617 men aged 30-54 years, we estimated individual's predicted heart age (PHA). Comparing the PHA with chronological age (CA), we categorized individuals in four groups: (i) low PHA: PHA < CA, (ii) equal PHA: PHA = CA (reference category), (iii) high PHA: PHA > CA by at most 4 years, and (iv) very high PHA: PHA > CA by 5 + years. We estimated multivariable multinomial logistic regressions to obtain relative risks of respective categories for the child marriage indicator.

We found that women who were married in childhood had 1.06 (95% CI 1.01-1.10) and 1.22 (95% CI 1.16-1.27) times higher adjusted risks of having high and very high PHA, respectively, compared to women who were married as adults. For men, no differential risks were found between those who were married as children and as adults. These results were generally robust across various socioeconomic sub-groups.

These findings add to the relatively new and evolving strand of literature that examines the role of child marriage on later life chronic health outcomes and provide important insights for public health policies aimed at improving women's health and wellbeing.