Sunday, June 7, 2015

Spirituality and quality of life

The National Cancer Institute defines spirituality as an individual's sense of peace or purpose and feelings about the meaning of life in general. Religiosity can be a conduit for spirituality in the context of specific beliefs and practices, usually in conjunction with other people who hold the same beliefs...
In terms of physical QOL, we found that religious patients had better QOL if they were highly spiritual. For mental QOL, we found a significant difference between the extreme groups (low spirituality/low religiosity and high spirituality/high religiosity), but our findings for mental QOL had another level of subtlety which raises a question as to what the role of religiosity is in mental QOL.
For example, among patients who have low levels of religiosity, patients who are highly spiritual have better mental QOL. Similarly, among patients who are highly religious, those who were highly spiritual had better QOL. However, among patients who were highly spiritual, we failed to detect a significant difference in mental QOL when comparing patients with high and low levels of religiosity…
Medscape: To a degree, your findings suggest that spirituality is more important than religiosity in terms of QOL, at least in this patient population.
Dr Cannon: For mental health, our findings say precisely that. Spirituality also confers benefits among patients who are highly religious, helping with physical QOL as well.Conversely, spirituality tends to be more intrinsic: Peace, purpose, the meaning of life, and connectedness to others are concepts that must be considered and understood by each individual. Therefore, we postulate that the aspects which constitute heightened spiritual awareness are the ones that preserve mental QOL because they help individuals cope with and understand hardship—in this case, a diagnosis of cancer.
Cannon AJ, Garcia J, Loberiza FR. Interplay between spirituality and religiosity on the physical and mental well-being of cancer survivors post-treatment. Program and abstracts of the 168th American Psychiatric Association Annual Meeting; May 16-20, 2015; Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Abstract 63.
 

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