Abstract
This chapter reviews theories and empirical evidence on relations between individually measured religion and/or spirituality (R/S), and mortality, physical morbidity, and disability . Most studies have relied on frameworks that recognize a potential causative influence of R/S on health that is mediated through factors such as health behaviors, social support, mental health, and distinctively religious/spiritual methods of coping with stress.
Dozens of empirical studies have examined relations between R/S and longevity, finding generally protective relations against all-cause mortality, with some evidence also suggesting reduced rates of cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, and respiratory mortality. A preponderance of recently systematically reviewed studies have also reported that R/S involvement is associated with morbidity, including lower rates of cardiovascular diseases, cancer, pulmonary disease, dementia, and disability, as well as with better risk profiles on physiological measures that include cardio reactivity, inflammation, and cholesterol. R/S has also been linked to better self-rated health in numerous high-quality studies, although the association may vary somewhat cross-culturally. Most studies of R/S and physical health outcomes have been conducted in the US, but the number of non-US and non-Western studies is growing, and their findings suggest that many favorable R/S-health relations are not confined to the US or Western society.
This chapter is one of thirteen reviews in this volume providing a public health perspective on the empirical evidence relating R/S to physical and mental health.
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Notes
- 1.
See chapter “Social and Community-Level Factors in Health Effects from Religion/Spirituality” (this volume) for a review of the small number of R/S-mortality studies that have employed collective-level R/S measures, such as county counts of congregations (e.g., Blanchard et al. 2008).
- 2.
Another recent publication identified a total of 17 studies that contained distinct measures of both R/S-based social participation and other forms of social participation, suggesting the possibility of further analyses of how R/S and other forms of social support may interact (see Table 1 in Shor and Roelfs 2013). These investigators did not report any focused investigation within these 17 studies of within-sample relations of benefits from R/S versus other social supports or their interactions, instead pursuing arguably less powerful and less valid meta-regressions that depended on multiple untested assumptions.
- 3.
However, since the category of being Jewish can refer to ethnic identity rather than religious engagement or belief, the tables do include studies that compared religious and “secular” Jewish populations.
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Oman, D. (2018). Religious/Spiritual Effects on Physical Morbidity and Mortality. In: Oman, D. (eds) Why Religion and Spirituality Matter for Public Health. Religion, Spirituality and Health: A Social Scientific Approach, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73966-3_4
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