BehindTheMedspeak: Who will save your soul? God v treadmill

Jennifer Huget, in the April 18 Washington Post Health section, wrote about a new scientific study suggesting that weekly religious attendance might "extend your life nearly as much as regular exercise or statins...."

Which got me to wondering: what if some gym owned by a conventionally religious individual decided to hold a Saturday or Sunday morning service, with a priest or a preacher or rabbi or whomever, in which you were allowed to get on a treadmill or use the stairmaster or elliptical or weights or whatever you liked while you worshipped?

Free to all comers.

I predict the place would be packed.

And you can bet it that as soon as they heard about it in LA — assuming it didn't start there — attendance among the Paris Hilton/Lindsay Lohan/Madonna crowd would be de rigueur — in a New York minute.

Here's Huget's Post story.

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Exercising, Religiously

Could weekly religious attendance extend your life nearly as much as regular exercise or statins?

That's one way to view some new research by a University of Pittsburgh Medical Center physician, published in the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine.

The study jockeys numbers from life expectancy tables and mortality studies to suggest that weekly worship may add two to three years to life.

That compares to three to five years for regular exercise and 2.5 to 3.5 years for cholesterol-lowering statin drugs.

Study author Daniel Hall, who also happens to be an Episcopal priest, goes on to conduct a cost/benefit analysis.

According to his estimate of the costs of tithing, gym membership and statins, while exercise is the best buy, religious attendance trumps statins in terms of years gained per dollar spent.

Not So Fast: Tom Denberg, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center and a member of the Society of General Internal Medicine, faulted the peer-reviewed study for failing to account for other behaviors that may explain churchgoers' relative longevity.

For instance, religious people may be less likely to smoke.

That, rather than religion, might extend their lives.

Denberg labeled the study "part of a larger, troubling movement in American society to enhance the scientific credibility of [religious] concepts. . . . Certainly, religious beliefs are valuable to those who hold them," he wrote in an e-mail, "but scientific studies of the potential health benefits of religion need to go beyond the mere reporting of associations."

Next Steps: While Hall admits that his religious beliefs might bias him, he maintains that his argument "proceeds solely on secular and scientific grounds."

And, he adds, while religion isn't a form of medical therapy, the study -- funded by the John Templeton Foundation, which focuses on the intersection of theology and science -- sheds enough light to -- you guessed it -- warrant further research.

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I'm sure that the fact the study's author is also an Episcopal priest didn't affect his results or conclusions.

And there's no such thing as a moral hazard.

Do we really look that stupid?

Here's the abstract of Hall's study.

Religious Attendance: More Cost-Effective Than Lipitor?

Background: A recent meta-analysis demonstrates a robust but small association between weekly religious attendance and longer life. However, the practical significance of this finding remains controversial.

Methods: Age specific, actuarial death rates were modified according to published odds ratios to model the additional years of life attributable to: (1) weekly religious attendance; (2) regular physical exercise; and (3) statin-type lipid-lowering agents. Secondary analyses estimated the approximate cost for each additional year of life gained.

Results: Weekly attendance at religious services accounts for an additional 2 to 3 life-years compared with 3 to 5 life-years for physical exercise and 2.5 to 3.5 life-years for statin-type agents. The approximate cost per life-year gained was between $2,000 and $6,000 for regular exercise, $3,000 and $10,000 for regular religious attendance, and between $4,000 and $14,000 for statin-type agents.

Conclusion: The real-world, practical significance of regular religious attendance is comparable to commonly recommended therapies, and rough estimates even suggest that religious attendance may be more cost-effective than statins. Religious attendance is not a mode of medical therapy, but these findings warrant more and better quality research designed to examine the associations between religion and health, and the potential relevance such associations might have for medical practice.

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FunFact: how Jewel came to write the song.