Good News If You’re Middle-Aged and Go to Church

Regular church attendance could extend one’s life, suggests new research.

“A recent study by Vanderbilt University professor Marino Bruce has found that people who attend religious services live longer and are less stressed,” USA Today reported.

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Bruce and other researchers found church attendance at any place of worship (of any religion) was good for one’s health.

“For those who did not attend church at all, they were twice as likely to die prematurely than [were] those who attended church at some point over the last year,” Bruce said in a video posted to Vanderbilt’s YouTube page.

Bruce is a social and behavioral scientist and associate director of the Center for Research on Men’s Health at Vanderbilt in Nashville, Tennessee.

Researchers looked at data from over 5,400 people for the study. They used data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey — from data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics.

“While interest in the relationship between religion and health is almost as old as humanity, the science relating these rich concepts has grown considerably in the past two decades as increasing numbers of peer-reviewed articles have been reported with results from studies exploring links between religion and various dimensions of physical or mental health,” Bruce’s study noted.

Related: Faith Feedback: ‘Others Keep Distracting Me in Church’

The study is called “Church Attendance, Allostatic Load and Mortality in Middle Aged Adults.”

The Plos One journal published the study on May 16.

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Conclusions in other literature have been “mixed” and have had varying results about the relationship between church attendance and lifespan.

“Thus, the effect of religiosity or church attendance on health may be mediated in part by a healthy lifestyle, social cohesion, or other factors, such as mitigating stress,” the study noted.

Attending church on a weekly basis or monthly basis did not have a significant difference, the study found, so some church attendance and non-church goers were compared when looking at the impact on a physiological measure of stress called allostatic load.

Non-church goers had a higher allostatic load.

Related: Catholic Church Ends Support of Kansas City Girl Scouts

The results showed a significant relationship between middle-aged adults and church attendance. The health of those in the 40- to 65-year-age range seems to benefit most from church attendance. If attending church more than once per week, then the activity reduced this age group’s mortality by 55 percent compared with non-churchgoers, according to the research.

“This relationship remained significant even after adjustment for education, poverty status, health insurance status, self-rated health, social support, and [allostatic load], suggesting a potential independent effect of religiosity on mortality,” according to the study.

Related: The Elderly Friend Who Needs Us

Researchers admit there are limitations to their findings.

“It is also possible that the health benefits of religiosity have been underestimated because of the crude or imprecise measurement,” the study noted. “Church attendance can represent a public expression of religiosity but does not account for private practices such as prayer.”