Relationship between Spirituality/Religiosity, Health Habits and Health Outcome

Role of spirituality/religiosity in health research have been studied for several decades. However, the results of such investigations had often been conflicting because of lack of objective measurement of religiosity and spirituality until recently. With the development of valid questionnaire instruments, recent studies showed that health habits generally improve with spirituality and religiosity, which in turn reduces the risk of adverse health outcomes. The purpose of this research is to show that cross-sectional studies on this topic are to be interpreted with caution, since the link of spirituality/religiosity, health habits, and health outcomes in a general population may be different from that in patients. While in a general population individuals with higher scores of spirituality and religiosity generally have better health habits, and consequently lesser adverse health outcomes, patients with more severe health problems may become more spiritual, and thus may demonstrate a spurious negative association of healthy habits and disease outcome. In this presentation empirical evidence of this is presented by studying three-way associations of spirituality/ religiosity, health habits, and metabolic syndrome in a cohort of subjects enrolled in the North Texas Healthy Heart Study and in a general population of the Fernald Community Cohort from Ohio. These observations suggest that the three-way association of spirituality/religiosity, health habits, and health outcome will have to account for changes of spiritual and health habit behaviors with age, without which the role of spirituality and religiosity on health habit and health outcome cannot be reliably assessed.