How going to church could help you live longer

Everlasting life? How going to church could help you live longer 

Picture posted on Twitter showing Church of England bishops dancing in St Paul's Cathedral, London, on Pentecost Sunday CREDIT: PETE GREIG

•  John Bingham, religious affairs editor 

16 MAY 2016 • 5:35PM

For the last the last 2,000 years it has preached a message of eternal life – but only in the hereafter.

Now experts have pointed to evidence that going to church could also actively help people live longer in the here and now.

Epidemiologists analysed data charting the lives of more than 74,000 women over a 16-year period and found that the most regular churchgoers were 33 per less likely to die during that time than those who never attended services.

But even those who went to church sporadically appeared to have significantly better survival rates than those who never did so.

They noted that there were fewer deaths from heart disease and cancer in particular among the regular churchgoers than those who did not attend.

The international team of researchers, including Prof Tyler VanderWeele, professor of epidemiology at the TH Chan School of Public Health at Harvard, suggested that being part of a congregation not only may have discouraged habits such as smoking, but made them less likely to feel lonely and more optimistic.

Frequent attendance at religious services was associated with significantly lower risk of all-cause, cardiovascular, and cancer mortality among womenstudy published in JAMA Internal Medicine

Previous research has shown a statistical link between reporting feeling lonely and suffering poor health,estimated to be equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

A University College London study in 2011 also put forward a link between happiness and long life.  

The new study, published online in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, used information gathered for the Nurses' Health Study in which a large sample of American women, all of them nurses, were asked to fill in questionnaires about their lives between 1996 and 2012.

Of the 74,534 women surveyed at the start of the study, 13,537 had died by 2012, a third of them from cancer and a fifth from cardiovascular disease.

Almost one in five of those surveyed said they attended church more than once a week, another 40 per cent went weekly, just over one in sex were less frequent in the pews and a quarter never attended. 

Religion and spirituality may be an underappreciated resource that physicians could explore with their patients, as appropriatestudy conclusion

Those in the first group were a third less likely to have died than those in the non-churchgoing group.

 Specifically they were 27 per cent less likely to have died of cardiovascular disease and had a 21 per cent lower risk of dying from cancer.

Meanwhile the weekly churchgoers had a 26 per cent risk of dying than those who stayed away while those who attended less often had a 13 per cent lower risk, the researchers said.

The study concludes: “Religion and spirituality may be an underappreciated resource that physicians could explore with their patients, as appropriate.”