Frequent religious service attendance was associated with a significantly lower rate of suicide for women, a recent study found. Researchers evaluated associations between religious service attendance and suicide from 1996 through 2010, using a cohort of 89,708 women, aged 30 to 55 years, from the Nurses’ Health Study. They found:

• Attendance at religious services once per week or more was associated with an approximately 5-fold lower rate of suicide compared with never attending religious services.

• Service attendance once or more per week vs less frequent attendance was associated with a hazard ratio of 0.05 for Catholics but only 0.34 for Protestants.

• There was evidence that social integration, depressive symptoms, and alcohol consumption partially mediated the association among those occasionally attending services, but not for those attending frequently.

Citation: VanderWeele TJ, Li S, Tsai AC, Kawachi I. Association between religious service attendance and lower suicide rates among US women. [Published online ahead of print June 29, 2016]. JAMA Psychiatry. doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2016.1243.