Religious attendance as a predictor of survival in the EPESE cohorts

Interest has arisen in recent years in the relationship between religious involvement and health outcomes. Although most of the early literature consists of studies with methodological flaws, some recent well-conducted reports show that religious attendance is associated with reduced mortality in selected subgroups and populations.

In this study, we investigated the relationship between religious attendance and mortality using the 14,456 participants in the National Institute of Aging-funded 'Established Populations for Epidemiologic Studies of the Elderly'.

Our analyses show that after controlling for important prognostic factors, frequent religious attendance was associated with increased survival in the entire cohort [risk ratio (RR) = 0.78, 95% Confidence interval (CI) 0.70-0.88]. However, stratified analyses show that this association exists for only two of the four sites.

We conclude that the association between religious attendance and survival is not robust and may depend upon unknown confounders and covariates.