Want Lower Blood Pressure? Get Out to Church, Says a New Study

What did your grandmother always say?

If she urged you to go to church every week, pray regularly, and read the Bible often, a new study says she was giving good health advice. If she follows her own counsel, she's likely to have a 40% lower risk of stroke or heart attack than seniors who aren't religious.

In the latest of over a dozen studies conducted at Duke University Medical Center showing how religious activities improve health, researchers have demonstrated a strong correlation between lower blood pressure and church attendance, prayer, and Bible reading. Working with funding from the National Institute on Aging, researchers studied 4,000 men and women in North Carolina who were 65 and older in 1986, 1989, and 1992. After carefully controlling for all other factors, those who participated regularly in religious activities were found to have diastolic blood pressure readings of 78 millimeters of mercury, while the non-religious had readings of almost 81 millimeters.

Harold Koenig, an associate professor of psychiatry at Duke who co-authored the study, cites other studies which show that a reduction of 2 to 4 mm could cut heart-related deaths by up to 20%. Koenig stresses the importance of this new study for health and expresses confidence in its accuracy, declaring: "The likelihood of this finding happening randomly is less than one in ten thousand."

While religious activities protected all participants from age- and stress-related increases in blood pressure, this effect was particularly strong in blacks and those under the age of 75.

Researchers have not been able to pinpoint a cause-and-effect relationship, but this finding is consistent with other studies showing that those who are spiritual are better able to cope with stress. Co-author Linda George, a Duke sociology professor, pointed out that "religious people have better support systems which keep them healthier. The sense of meaning and kind of comfort that religious beliefs provide make them more resistant to stresses both physical and social."

One word of caution: subjects in the study who spent the most time glued to religious television or radio actually had higher blood pressure than those whose religion was less mediated. Conclusion: it's important to go out and get together with others.

The study will be published in the August issue of the International Journal of Psychiatry in Medicine 1998;28:189-213.