BOSTON - A husband or wife with a debilitating illness can hasten your own death, a study suggests. The researchers blame the stress and the loss of companionship, practical help, income and other support that can occur when a spouse gets sick.

"You can die of a broken heart not just when a partner dies, but when your partner falls ill," said chief researcher Dr. Nicholas Christakis at Harvard Medical School.

The study at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania was published Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine. The research, backed by the National Institutes of Health, analyzed Medicare records from a representative national sample of 518,240 elderly couples over nine years.