A new study has revealed the relationship between the severity of coronary artery disease in male patients and the number of wives they have.

The study has reported on April 29 at the Asian Pacific Society of Cardiology Congress 2015 held in Abu Dhabi.

Cardiologists recommended that the more wives a man has, the greater his risk of heart disease. At the conference Amin Daulah, MD, a cardiologist at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Center in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia said that having multiple wives increases the risk of heart disease by more than 4-fold.

For the study, the researchers analyzed male patients referred for coronary angiography at 5 hospitals in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. All had at least a 70% narrowing in a major blood vessel or more than 50% in the left main artery.

Out of 687 married men in the study most (68% or 130) had one wife, 19% (130) had 2 wives, 10% (70) had 3 wives and 3% (21) had 4 wives.

The researchers found 4.6 fold increased risk of coronary artery disease, a 3.5 fold increase in the risk of left main artery narrowing, and a 2.6 elevevated risk of multivessel disease in participants who has more than one wife.

According to Daoulah, this is due to the fact that having more wives requires more households to support the family. This requires men to have more than one job and increases their emotional stress.

He said, "Each household must be treated fairly and equally, and it seems likely that the stress of doing that for several spouses and possibly several families of children is considerable But he cautioned there could also be confounding factors contributing to his findings".