Science and Religion Today » Health

Do Women With Younger Husbands Die Earlier‎?

Heather Wax — Fri, 14 May 2010 16:21:27 +0000

Past studies have shown that men with younger wives live longer. But what about women with younger husbands? The theory was that an effect called “health selection” would apply to them, too: that those of us able to attract younger spouses are healthier and therefore already have a higher life expectancy. And younger spouses can better care for us in our old age, extending our life span.
Except according to new research by Sven Drefahl of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, who studied 2 million Danish couples, the larger the age gap between a wife and her husband, the lower her life expectancy—especially if her husband is younger. While men who marry women seven to nine years younger rather than someone their own age lower their risk of dying by 11 percent, a woman who marries a man seven to nine years younger increases her mortality risk by 20 percent.
Why would younger spouses extend the lives of men but not women? Researchers aren’t sure, but it’s likely that women don’t benefit psychologically and socially from a younger partner the way men do because they spend more time with their friends than do their husbands. And, adds Drefahl, women who marry someone younger might suffer more stress and receive less social support than women who, more traditionally, marry older men:

One of the few possible explanations is that couples with younger husbands violate social norms and thus suffer from social sanctions.

A woman’s best bet, he found, is to marry someone exactly the same age.

Can Black Churches Help With Cancer Awareness?

Heather Wax — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 15:47:01 +0000

Research has shown that black men are about twice as likely to die from prostate cancer than other racial or ethnic groups are. Yet they’re less likely to get screened for the disease. Why is that? And can “spiritually themed” health interventions help?
That’s what Cheryl Holt will try to find out. Holt, a social psychologist at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Health, is beginning a four-year study funded by the American Cancer Society to see whether black churchgoers can be trained as “community health advisers,” encouraging their peers to talk about prostate cancer with their doctors and get screened. The idea is to leverage the fact that the church is already recognized as a social network for black men.
As urologist Michael Naslund, who’s also working on the study, adds:

If you can access and educate people who carry weight and carry influence in the African American community, hopefully they can then go out and explain to people the importance of getting this done.

Health Benefit of Believing God Cares About You

Heather Wax — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 17:45:53 +0000

A new study from chaplains George Fitchett and Patricia Murphy of the Rush University Medical Center found that clinically depressed people who believe in a personal and caring God respond better to medical treatment for their illness than do those who don’t believe in a concerned God.
As Murphy, who’s also a professor of religion, health, and human values at Rush, notes:

The positive response to medication had little to do with the feeling of hope that typically accompanies spiritual belief. It was tied specifically to the belief that a Supreme Being cared.
For people diagnosed with clinical depression, medication certainly plays an important role in reducing symptoms. But when treating persons diagnosed with depression, clinicians need to be aware of the role of religion in their patients’ lives. It is an important resource in planning their care.

How Doctors Can Boost Cancer Patients’ Well-Being

Heather Wax — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 15:50:50 +0000

According to a new study from researchers at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, incurable cancer patients who receive spiritual care from doctors, nurses, and chaplains also receive less aggressive medical care and have a better quality of life as they approach death.
These are important findings, says Dr. Tracy Balboni, the study’s lead author, highlighting “the need to educate medical caregivers in being attentive to the frequent role of religion and spirituality in patients’ coping with advanced illness.”

Empathy for Patients Takes Toll on Nurses

Heather Wax — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 15:23:00 +0000

According to Jenny Watts, a positive psychologist at the University of Leicester, “nurses who identify with the patient and experience empathy appear to be most vulnerable to distress,” developing symptoms like flashbacks, sleeping problems, and emotional detachment.
Of particular note: Watts found that nurses who cared for patients with age-related illnesses, such as dementia, “have shown anxiety and depression following patient deterioration and death.” As baby boomers age and the number of older patients grows, she says, it will be important to take steps to ensure that nurses’ morale, compassion, and quality of care remain high. —Heather Wax

Does Personality Influence Longevity?

Heather Wax — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 10:27:00 +0000

Studying the children of those who have lived to 100 or older, scientists believe they’ve found certain personality traits that are associated with healthy aging and a longer life. (Longevity and personality traits have been shown to run in families.) As part of the New England Centenarian Study, researchers gave personality tests to nearly 250 children of centenarians. The results showed that both males and females scored low in neuroticism and high for extroversion—which might affect their health, says Dr. Thomas Perls, director of the study. “Interestingly, whereas men and women generally differ substantially in their personality characteristics, the male and female offspring tended to be similar, which speaks to the importance of these traits, irrespective of gender, for health aging and longevity,” he says. “For example, people who are lower in neuroticism are able to manage or regulate stressful situations more effectively than those with higher neuroticism levels. Similarly, high extroversion levels have been associated with establishing friendships and looking after yourself.”
The findings appear in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society online. —Heather Wax

Spirituality May Help Teens Cope With Illness

Heather Wax — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 10:26:00 +0000

Spirituality—defined as a sense of meaning and purpose in life and a connectedness with the divine—can help teens cope with chronic illness, according to new research led by Dr. Michael Yi, a professor of medicine, and Sian Cotton, a clinical psychologist and research scientist, at the University of Cincinnati. In two studies, they looked at how adolescents deal with inflammatory bowel disease, which causes chronic inflammation of the intestines and can lead to poorer quality of life with regard to health. “On average, when compared to their healthy peers, patients with IBD were willing to trade more years of their life expectancy or risk a greater chance of death in order to achieve a better state of health,” Yi says. One of the strongest predictors of poorer overall quality of life, the researchers found, is a lower level of spiritual well-being.
It also seems that spirituality might play a significant role in teens with IBD when it comes to emotional well-being—helping them to cope with their illness. While “both healthy adolescents and those with IBD had relatively high levels of spiritual well-being,” Cotton says, “the positive association between spiritual well-being and mental health outcomes was stronger in the adolescents with IBD as compared to their healthy peers.”
Currently, researchers are studying spiritual coping in teens with IBD, asthma, and sickle cell disease, with plans to extend their investigations to other chronic illnesses. “While adolescents with IBD have specific issues that are unique to that group, we feel that these studies help to create a systematic approach to better understanding spirituality and religious coping in pediatric populations,” Cotton says. “We felt it was best to examine these issues first in a homogeneous population and then determine whether these findings can be generalized in adolescents with other chronic conditions or how they might be different across different illness groups.”
The studies appear in online editions of the Journal of Pediatrics and the Journal of Adolescent Health. —Heather Wax

Clergy Often Dismiss Mental Illness

Heather Wax — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 10:11:00 +0000

Christians are often being told by their clergy that their previously diagnosed mental illnesses—like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia—aren’t real, according to a new study out of Baylor University in Texas. The researchers found that 32 percent of those who went to their local churches for help with their own or a family member’s serious mental illness were told that the cause of their problems was completely spiritual, the result of such things as personal sin, lack of faith, or demonic involvement.
“Those whose mental illness is dismissed by clergy are not only being told they don’t have a mental illness, they are also being told they need to stop taking their medication,” says Matthew Stanford, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Baylor, who led the study. “That can be a very dangerous thing.” The results take on even more weight when we’re reminded that research consistently shows that in time of psychological distress, people are more likely to seek help from clergy than from psychologists or other mental health experts.
Clergy were more likely to dismiss mental illness in women than in men, the researchers found, and overall, these denials occurred more often in conservative churches than liberal ones. The research also showed that church members who had their mental illness dismissed by their clergy were less likely to attend church afterward and the experience weakened their faith in God.
The results are published in the journal Mental Health, Religion and Culture. —Heather Wax

Meditation Linked to Health Benefits, Again

Heather Wax — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 09:26:00 +0000

A new study suggests that cultivating compassion through meditation can lead to reductions in the body’s inflammatory and emotional responses to stress, which are linked to a variety of mental and physical illnesses. The study, led by Dr. Charles Raison, clinical director of Emory University’s Mind-Body Program, divided 61 college students into two groups: one participated in compassion meditation classes based on a Tibetan Buddhist mind-training practice, while the other took part in health discussions. While little difference was found between the stress responses of the two groups, the researchers did find that the more hours students in the training group spent meditating, the less severe were their bodies’ inflammatory and emotional reactions to psychological stress.
“It will require conducting stress tests before and after meditation training in order to conclusively show it was the practice of compassion meditation that resulted in reduced stress responses,” says Thaddeus Pace, a professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory. “But these initial results are quite exciting. If practicing compassion meditation does reduce inflammatory responses to stress it might offer real promise as a means of preventing many conditions associated with stress and with inflammation including major depression, heart disease, and diabetes.” Based on these findings, Pace and his colleagues will offer compassion meditation classes to patients at Emory Winship Cancer Institute, and the researchers are teaming with the Emory Predictive Health Institute for a series of studies on the potential long-term health benefits of compassion meditation. —Stephen Mapes

Moms of Dying Newborns Tune Out Doctors

Heather Wax — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 11:40:00 +0000

Most new mothers who give birth to terminally ill or severely premature babies tend to tune out their discussions with doctors about what treatment options are available, as well as the predictions of morbidity and death, and let their decisions about life support be guided by things like hope, religion, and spirituality, according to a new study published in this month’s issue of the journal Pediatrics. The researchers, from Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, interviewed 26 mothers whose babies died shortly after birth and found that what these mothers remembered doctors telling them was often very different from what the doctors recorded in the medical charts.
Few of the moms remembered discussing options for delivery room resuscitation with doctors, and even fewer remembered being offered comfort care as an option—even though doctors documented that these options were discussed. According to the study, some of the moms “felt that they had not made any decisions regarding resuscitation and instead ‘left things in God’s hands.’ These parents typically were documented by staff members to ‘want everything done.’”
One problem, it’s believed, is that these complex discussions and decisions take place during a time of emotional and physical stress. Another problem is the technical language doctors often use, which many new moms find confusing. “We found that the parents of gravely ill newborns, who are understandably overwhelmed, are quite confused by the often technical and vague ‘doctor speak.’ We, as physicians and caregivers, really need to come up with a clearer way of talking with parents during this incredibly hard time,” Dr. Renee Boss, a neonatologist at the center and the study’s lead researcher (pictured above), said in a news release.
The mothers who were interviewed also said they felt a deeper sense of trust toward doctors who showed emotion during their discussions, regardless of the prognosis they had for the baby. “What this study tells us is doctors should become better at delivering grim prognoses unequivocally, yet compassionately, but many doctors are uncomfortable expressing emotion during such intense moments,” says Dr. Nancy Hutton, head of the pediatric palliative care program at the center, who also worked on the study. “Some doctors might think showing empathy and being positive could give parents a false sense of hope, but there are ways to be hopeful and realistic at the same time, we just need to train doctors to do it better.” —Heather Wax