Main point: "...religiosity (an index of religious attendance, prayer frequency, and religious identity) was positively associated with leukocyte telomere length, even with adjustments for religious support, religious coping, age, gender, race, education, employment status, income, financial strain, stressful life events, marital status, family support, friend support, depressive symptoms, smoking, heavy drinking, and allostatic load."
Key points:
- "...religious support and religious coping were unrelated to leukocyte telomere length across models."
- "Depressive symptoms, smoking, heavy drinking, and allostatic load failed to explain any of the association between religiosity and telomere length."
- "To our knowledge, this is the first population-based study to link religious involvement and cellular aging."
- "Although our data suggest that adults who frequently attend religious services, pray with regularity, and consider themselves to be religious tend to exhibit longer telomeres than those who attend and pray less frequently and do not consider themselves to be religious, additional research is needed to establish the mechanisms underlying this association."
Why should we care?
Telomere length is the latest area of research on what causes aging and how to deal with it. If you do an Internet search for "telomeres and aging," you'll find a lot of results about research that has been making its way into the general media.
There may be ways to take matters into your own hands and take care of your telomeres: "Better choice of diet and activities has great potential to reduce the rate of telomere shortening or at least prevent excessive telomere attrition, leading to delayed onset of age-associated diseases and increased lifespan."
