Overview and findings from the religious orders study
Related Experiment Video
Updated: May 23, 2026

Religious Chanting and Self-Related Brain Regions: A Multi-Modal Neuroimaging Study
Published on: May 31, 2024
David A Bennett1, Julie A Schneider, Zoe Arvanitakis
1Rush Alzheimer's Disease Center, Rush University Medical Center, 600 S. Paulina, Suite 1028, Chicago, IL 60612, USA. David_A_Bennett@Rush.edu
Unlabelled:
The Religious Orders Study is a longitudinal clinical-pathologic cohort study of aging and Alzheimer's disease (AD). In this manuscript, we summarize the study methods including the study design and describe the clinical evaluation, assessment of risk factors, collection of ante-mortem biological specimens, brain autopsy and collection of selected postmortem data.
The Results:
(1) review the relation of neuropathologic indices to clinical diagnoses and cognition proximate to death; (2) examine the relation of risk factors to clinical outcomes; (3) examine the relation of risk factors to measures of neuropathology; and (4) summarize additional study findings. We then discuss and contextualize the study findings.
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