Religious Denomination, Religiosity, Religious Attendance, and Cancer Prevention. A Systematic Review

Abstract

Recent research highlighted the influence of religion among health outcomes. To the best of our knowledge, there is no systematic review that summarizes the evidence on the relationship between religious factors and the utilization of cancer screenings. Therefore, this article aims to list the findings about the influence of religious denominations, the importance of religion in one’s life, and religious practices, such as church attendance on the utilization of cancer screenings. PubMed, PsycInfo and CINAHL were searched using a predefined algorithm in June 2020. We included observational studies that examined the association between religion and cancer screening use and employed appropriate items to quantify these key variables. Study selection, data extraction and quality assessment were performed independently by two reviewers. We detected n=27 studies that fulfilled the inclusion criteria. Hereby, n=16 used data from the United States. Most of the studies that were included in our review found a positive association between religious attendance and cancer screening utilization. There was mixed evidence concerning religious denomination as well as religiosity and use of cancer screenings. The studies suggest that religious factors are related to the utilization of cancer screenings. The findings of this systematic review may be helpful to resolve the underuse of cancer screenings by revealing at-risk-groups.

Analyzing the Performance of Explainable Machine Learning Models in Risk Factor Identification for Major Cancers (Preprint)

“…Although there may not be existing evidence to confirm that marital status is an independent risk factor for cancer, observational studies demonstrate that married status is associated with reduced risk of cancer-specific and all-cause mortality 27,28 . Religion and spirituality are important in patient cancer care, and specifically, a systematic review suggests a positive association between religious attendance and cancer screening utilization 29 . Our models not only confirmed the significance of these risk factors for each cancer type but also our RF-based model facilitated an interpretable analysis, allowing us to clearly rank the significance of each risk factor, while the MLP-based model provided deeper insights into complex, non-linear interactions among the risk factors.…”

The link between spirituality and longevity

“…There is growing interest on the role of S/R practices in cancer prevention. A recent systematic review [ 35 ] evaluated the influence of religious denominations, the importance of religion in one’s life, and religious practices such as church attendance, on the utilization of cancer screenings. Most of the 27 studies included reported a positive association of religious attendance with cancer screening utilization and mixed evidence concerning religious denomination and religiosity.…”