Religious Service Attendance May Prolong Lung Health for Seniors

Newswise — A new study suggests that churchgoing has more benefits than spiritual growth and camaraderie — it may boost lung health too.

Researchers found that seniors who regularly attended religious services suffered from lower levels of pulmonary decline.

It is important for doctors "to acknowledge that many patients have a religious life and that this aspect of their life likely influences their health," said study lead author Dr. Joanna Maselko, epidemiology research fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health.

In recent years, researchers have explored the subject of religion, examining whether spirituality and prayer may contribute to physical well-being.

The new research looks at statistics from a previous study of 1,174 seniors followed for an average of almost five years starting in the late 1980s. The participants, ages 70 to 79, answered questions about churchgoing and underwent tests of their lung function.

The findings of the new study appear in the upcoming issue of the Annals of Behavioral Medicine.

"We found that the lungs of elderly persons who continue to attend religious services stay healthier over time as compared to those who do not attend religious services," Maselko said. "We also found that this could not be explained by the fact that religious people tended to smoke less and or were more physically active."

The lung test used — peak expiratory flow rate — measures how fast people can exhale in liters of air per minute. Men who regularly attended religious services had a slower rate of decline over time — dropping 3.71 liters less yearly compared to men who did not attend. Women who attended services dropped 3.27 liters less than women who never attended.

"Together, these findings suggest that the pulmonary function of those who attend services regularly ages at about half the rate of those who do never attend," the researchers concluded.

Maselko said the researchers chose to look at lung function because it's a good indicator of other health problems and had not been examined before in this context.

Richard Sloan, Ph.D., professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, was skeptical. He said the positive effects of churchgoing didn't immediately appear in the study, but only showed up after the participants have been studied for a few years.

"Why does [this effect] only begin at 75? Why not 65?" asked Sloan, author of the upcoming book "Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine."

Sloan added that that it's difficult to figure out exactly what religious attendance means since people go to services for so many reasons: "religious devotion, habit, not having anything else to do, to fend off loneliness."

Maselko J. Religious service attendance and decline in pulmonary function in a high functioning elderly cohort. Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 32(3), 2006.