August 13, 2001
Study Suggests Shaken Faith Can Worsen Poor Health
By ERICA GOODE
eligion and good health go hand in hand. Or so some researchers have asserted in studies over the last half decade, saying that people who attend church regularly, pray or are otherwise involved in religious activities enjoy longer lives and other positive health benefits.
But in a study published today, researchers contend that some forms of religious anxiety may in fact increase the risk of death among people who are ill.
The researchers, who surveyed 596 elderly hospitalized patients in 1996, found that those who said they "wondered whether God had abandoned me," "questioned God's love for me" or "decided the devil made this happen" were more likely two years later to have died than patients who did not endorse such statements. The patients in the study were almost exclusively Christian, with the majority representing conservative or mainline Protestant denominations.
"We know from quite a bit of research that religion can be a potent resource," said Dr. Kenneth I. Pargament, a professor of psychology at Bowling Green University in Ohio and the lead author of the study, which appears in Archives of Internal Medicine.
"But it's also clear that religion has a darker side," Dr. Pargament said. "It can be a source of solutions but it can also be a source of problems. This study helps lend some balance to the whole field."
Other experts, however, expressed skepticism about the study's findings. They noted that the number of subjects in the study was small and that the greater number of deaths among patients who endorsed items representative of religious struggle might be explained in other ways.
Dr. Pargament agreed that the findings had not yet been confirmed by other researchers, but he said other studies had found that internal struggle over religious beliefs was associated with poorer health. And he cautioned that people should not conclude that if they were angry at God, they would die.
In many religious traditions struggle is portrayed as a prelude to growth, Dr. Pargament said.
"From Moses to Jesus to Buddha, you see religious figures going through dark nights of the soul and through that process they come out steeled and strengthened," he said.
But he said the study suggests that some people appeared unable to resolve their feelings of anger, guilt or anxiety and that their health might have suffered as a result.
Dr. Harold G. Koenig, a professor of psychiatry and medicine at Duke University Medical Center and another author of the study, said, "It's normal to ask God, `Why is this happening to me? Did I do something wrong? Why aren't you responding to my prayers?' "
"All these are normal feelings but people work through them usually, and people who can't, who get stuck there, they are going to have worse health outcomes," Dr. Koenig said.
But Dr. David Freedman, a professor of statistics at the University of California at Berkeley, who has worked extensively in epidemiology, said he doubted much could be concluded about the effects of religious struggle on the basis of the study's findings.
"With a tiny effect like this, you have to be very cautious about bias," Dr. Freedman said.
He noted that the increase in risk reported by the researchers was tiny in comparison with that produced by other known health risks, like smoking, or by demographic differences, like age and race.
What he found particularly troubling, Dr. Freedman said, was that so many subjects could not be found when the researchers followed up, because a few more deaths among the patients who did not express negative views would have shifted the results in the other direction. Of the patients in the original sample, 152 could not be located at the two-year follow-up.
Dr. Pargament conceded that it would have been nice to know more about these people, but he said the findings held up even when the number of lost patients was taken into account through statistical adjustments.
Dr. Bruce S. Rabin, medical director of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center's Health Enhancement Program, said that coping styles and spirituality clearly played a role in health and longevity, and said that the study served "to confirm and suggest that there is a mind-body connection."
But because so little was known about the patients' histories and how they lived, Dr. Rabin added, the link between their religious behavior and the increased risk of death was less certain.
"I don't think when you look at an angry population like this that one can say it's just because of their religious behavior," he said.
From the New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/13/health/psychology/13RELI.html
JanG
CAIC Website: http://caic.org.au/zjws.htm
Personal Webpage: http://uq.net.au/~zzjgroen/